Labor & Employment Law

1,000 Nurses to Rally, Lobby for Safer Patient Care on Capitol Hill

By James Parks

Nearly 1,000 members of National Nurses United (NNU) are in Washington, D.C., today and tomorrow, where they are meeting with their lawmakers in support of legislation that combats the nursing shortage and makes patient care safer. They are calling for a more ambitious overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

As part of NNU’s legislative conference, nurses will march and rally on Capitol Hill tomorrow before talking with their representatives and senators.    

This morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the nurses that members of Congress need to hear what it’s really like at Ground Zero in health care.

…our elected representatives can hear right from you about what working families need most today. Not from the big-money K Street lobbyists. Not from the Chamber of Commerce mouthpieces. Not from the hospital CEOs or industry suits. Right from heroes like you.

When you speak, they listen and they learn why safe staffing levels matter, why universal, single-payer health care matters, why it matters for every worker, every nurse to have the freedom to bargain collectively.

The nurses are backing S. 1031, the National Nursing Shortage Reform and Patient Advocacy Act. Introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the bill would establish a federal standard for a nurse-to-patient ratio at hospitals nationwide. The bill is modeled after a California state law that set minimum ratios there.

Last month, a University of Pennsylvania study found that there would have been nearly 14 percent fewer surgical deaths in New Jersey and more than 10 percent fewer surgical deaths in Pennsylvania in 2006 if hospitals in these states had followed the California model.

As Jean Ross, one of  NNU’s three co-presidents, told The Hill newspaper:

[The California law] has done just what we said it would do. More nurses come into the profession, more nurses stay in the profession and hundreds of thousands of patients’ lives can be saved.

NNU Co-President Karen Higgins adds:

Improving the quality of care is a central component of the unfinished business of health care reform. Fortunately nurses have the solution?common sense, comprehensive legislative repairs for our health care system that will protect patients.

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is scheduled to speak, along with Boxer and several other members of Congress.

The conference coincides with National Nurses Week, which centers around the May 12 anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, often considered the founder of modern nursing.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on May 11, 2010 (boomark / email).