NORTHAMPTON — Locked in contract negotiations for more than a year, Baystate Health’s visiting nurses and their allies are taking their message public.

Members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, along with representatives of other local labor leaders, stood outside Baystate Health and Wellness Center on King Street on Monday morning in solidarity with visiting nurses bargaining for a new contract within the hospital system.

Unlike regular nurses, visiting nurses make home visits to patients to provide care. Their contract negotiations with Baystate have been going on for over a year, according Rose Bookbinder, an associate director of labor action at the MNA and who was one of around a dozen people standing along King Street. The MNA is representing the bargaining unit of visiting nurses of Baystate during the negotiations.

“We have been fighting to protect just the basics,” Bookbinder said. “Baystate’s been really trying to undermine the contract by taking away health insurance benefits that they had negotiated, minimal wage increases and a myriad of other kinds of takeaways, and we’ve luckily won on many of those issues.”

The final holdout, Bookbinder said, was try to increase retention and recruitment by ensuring salaries are competitive with other visiting nurses.

“These nurses predominantly help low-income neighborhoods in Springfield, that are immigrants and Black folks,” Bookbinder said. “These nurses are critical to keeping those communities healthy after they leave the hospital.”

In addition to the standout in Northampton on Monday, MNA delivered a petition to Baystate’s offices in Springfield the previous week, calling on Baystate President and CEO Peter Banko to approve the new contract.

Baystate Health officials did not return requests for comment regarding the negotiations.

Patty Healey, a retired nurse who formerly worked for Cooley Dickinson Hospital, said she joined the standout in Northampton because she understood the stress and heavy workloads nurses go through.

“I think the visiting nurses are overloaded with incredibly sick patients,” Healey said. “It’s not just going and checking someone’s blood pressure. It’s this array of illnesses that they’re taking care of in a very short time, doing all of these tasks much more than they did five years ago.”

The negotiations remain underway as Baystate undergoes several large structural changes, with the system losing hundreds of millions over the last several years and have undergone corporate restructuring efforts under Banko to try to alleviate those losses. The largest health care organization in western Massachusetts, Baystate Health is a not-for-profit, integrated health system serving over 800,000 people throughout western New England.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.