Sky-high pay for Valley Children’s execs stuns longtime nurse. ‘I felt gutted.’ | Opinion

Months before the earnings of Valley Children’s Hospital executives became public knowledge, a former nurse looked up the nonprofit’s tax returns on the investigative news site ProPublica.

What Barbara found out proved detrimental to her health.

“It caused me sleepless nights,” she said about her December discovery that Valley Children’s CEO Todd Suntrapak pocketed more than $5 million in consecutive years, in addition to other perks and deferments, while five senior vice presidents made more than $1 million.

“I felt gutted.”

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Barbara, which is not her real name, worked as a registered nurse at Valley Children’s Hospital for more than 30 years. She shared information about her experience on the condition that I didn’t identify her or her specific duties.

Recent columns about small donations to Valley Children’s in light of the giant salaries paid to Suntrapak and others, as well as the hospital’s dense response to criticism, generated dozens of emails and phone messages — including several from former nurses and immediate family members of current staff.

Among the most common themes/talking-points/requests: Compare what Suntrapak and other higher-ups make to the relatively paltry pay of Valley Children’s nurses, who are among the lowest compensated of any Fresno-area hospital.

The latter point seems to be both accepted fact as well as actual truth, though the Madera County children’s hospital has taken recent steps (i.e. since the executive pay story broke) to close that gap.

Barbara told me it’s “widely accepted” among Valley Children’s nurses that they could be earning higher pay working elsewhere. She recalled a conversation with a nursing manager during which she made the point that she and her colleagues are short-changing their families by settling for lower wages.

“His reply was, ‘If what you’re interested in is money, I don’t want to hire you,’ ” she said. “I’ll always remember that conversation.”

When Barbara looked up Valley Children’s tax forms, she learned the nursing manager’s annual salary was $400,000. Barbara made less than $100,000 during the same year.

“While administrators are getting rich, nurses and their families get shortchanged,” she said.

Comparing hospital nurse pay

How much do Valley Children’s nurses get paid compared to those at other local hospitals? To answer that, I examined the current job openings at Valley Children’s and compared their listed salary ranges to those listed for similar staff openings at Community Health System and Saint Agnes Medical Center. (Kaiser Permanente nurses in Fresno are unionized, which doesn’t make for a fair comparison). I also looked at online salary data compiled by employment recruiting websites.

Based on that data, one can conclude that nurses at Valley Children’s generally work for less pay. However, the situation is fluid.

When I first looked up Valley Children’s job openings, on March 21, the lowest advertised salary ranges for 33 registered nurses in non-surgical or emergency departments was between $36 to $62.20 per hour, depending on experience.

But during a re-check earlier this week, the lowest-paid positions had salary ranges of between $40 to $66.20 per hour. Likewise, a job posting for a nurse practitioner/physician assistant in neurology that used to pay $59 to $94 per hour was listed at $68.90 to $111.

That’s interesting. Hope the current staff get a raise, too.

Thanks to these recent bumps, the starting pay for Valley Children’s nurses is now higher than similar jobs at Community Health System — with the caveat that quite a few Community Health positions come with signing bonuses of $5,000 and $10,000.

For comparison, based on current job listings, an emergency department nurse can expect to make between $42.17 to $66.20 per hour at Valley Children’s, between $38.98 to $61.56 per hour at Community Health and between $44.23 to $64.14 per hour at Saint Agnes.

The average salary for a registered nurse in Fresno is $51.86 per hour, according to more than 2,000 salaries compiled at Indeed.com. The same website lists Valley Children’s nurses making an average of $39.97 per hour compared to $50.60 for Community Health and $45.67 for Saint Agnes.

Fresno nurses, on the whole, work for less than their counterparts in other Central Valley cities. The mean hourly wage for 8,340 registered nurses in Fresno in May 2022 was $59.31 per hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which is less than the average for nurses in Stockton ($62.68), Modesto ($66.59) and Sacramento ($69.82) as well as the statewide average of $64.10.

Why work for less?

Why have Valley Children’s nurses been willing to work for lower pay? Barbara says there are many reasons that mostly involve the patients.

“There’s a lot of camaraderie among the nurses at Valley Children’s Hospital,” she said. “When you take care of children, it’s just a different feeling.”

The presence of children, Barbara told me, made for a more professional atmosphere than the county general hospital where she previously worked. Lewd jokes weren’t tolerated even if the patient was under anesthesia.

Children are also easier to manage than adults, she added, both in the physical transport sense as well as during the spiritual travails of recovery. Nurses also form attachments to certain patients who make frequent hospital visits, such as a child with a rare disease.

Barbara believed in Valley Children’s mission so much that she voluntarily contributed $50 from each paycheck to the hospital’s patient care fund. Money that might help a poor family install a handicapped shower or pay its PG&E bill.

“Now I feel like a fool for the donations I made,” Barbara wrote in her initial email.

When Barbara and I spoke by phone, I asked why she felt that way. She replied that up until now, she had no idea how much income inequity existed between Valley Children’s executives and its nurses.

“It’s as if you had a very nice marriage and after 30 years you find out your spouse had a secret,” she said. “Like another love interest or maybe they were a liar. And you just feel, ‘Gosh, it wasn’t what I thought.’ You feel taken advantage of a little bit.”