For the past fifteen years, the state of Rhode Island has contracted with the University of Rhode Island to fund approximately ten graduate assistants in the physical therapy department in exchange for each providing ten hours a week of physical therapy to patients at Eleanor Slater Hospital, which houses patients with acute and long-term medical illness, as well as those with psychiatric disorders. But that funding was eliminated in the last round of state budget cuts. Those students are without funding and the patients are without physical therapy.
—Report of a union activist at the University of Rhode Island.
