November/December, 2005

Nurses Call for RNs to Step Forward in the Struggle for Quality, Universal Health Care

by Bob Lee

CHICAGO – Several dozen Chicago nurses gathered at a hotel here Oct. 14 to hear local and national representatives of the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) call for registered nurses to step forward across the country to help build and lead a movement “to change the face of health care in this country.”

The speakers included Trande Phillips, a working nurse who is a member of the board of directors of the California Nurses Association (CNA). The NNOC originated as an initiative of the CNA, Phillips told the People’s Tribune. She said California nurses had fought for and won reforms in California, such as nurse-patient ratios, designed to guarantee better care for patients, but the nurses realized that those reforms could eventually be undermined if they were not extended to the entire country. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent attempts to strike down nurse-patient ratios made the need for a national organizing effort all the more clear, said Phillips.

The NNOC is trying to organize nurses at hospitals in a number of states, including Illinois, where it won an election to represent nurses at Stroger Hospital of Cook County in Chicago earlier this year. Phillips said the national tour she is part of is “going to different cities, doing outreach to meet the staff nurses in those communities. We’re proud of being patient advocates, fighting for better staffing, fighting for families being able to get the care they need. And we’re telling nurses that rather than just talking amongst yourselves and being so frustrated, we need a committed core of nurses across the country that will fight for these issues. And from that base group of people we can begin to grow.

“We’re trying to make nurses understand you’re respected and listened to, you’re decision makers and you can make a difference,” she said. “This committed core across the country is going to change the face of health care and make registered nurses the people they should be. We’re respected, now we need to be the spokesperson for the public.”

Phillips added: “We’ve had an incredible response. We have thousands of nurses across the country that have joined NNOC just by going to our web site (www.nnoc.net) and hearing some of the things we’re doing.”

She said the effort to mobilize RNs as patient advocates dovetails with the fight for universal health care in the US. Phillips said the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has opened many people’s eyes to the fact that the current health care system “really isn’t working, and the government has no plan to take care of us.” She said this, combined with the rising personal bankruptcies (half of which are caused by health care bills) and “workers in all sorts of settings losing their health care,” has created an opportunity to talk to Americans about universal health care. “The window of opportunity will close if we don’t give people more information and open their eyes. We have to step into that opportunity and speak out,” she said.

The NNOC favors a constitutional amendment that guarantees a right to health care.

Another speaker, Stroger Hospital nurse Diane Ellis, had recently returned from Texas, where she gone with a group of other nurses and doctors from Chicago to help hurricane victims. She is a member of the local NNOC Bargaining Committee. “In Texas my experience was kind of one of great sadness because what I experienced there was just poor people,” she told the People’s Tribune.

She said the nurses reported the poverty they saw to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representatives in the area, and FEMA “basically told us, ‘that’s the way those people live, so if you try to deal with those issues you’ll be there forever.’ They were poor people. The people that I encountered were all Caucasian. They welcomed us. They opened their arms to us. They fed us. They helped each other, with real simple things. This one girl and her mother they lived in a trailer home and had no power. They were basically living off the land. They’d shoot squirrels and whatever else they could get.”

Ellis added: “You had a lot of family members that are putting up other family members and friends, and it’s a real hardship on them because they didn’t have that much and now they’re sharing what they have. That’s why I say they were all victims.

“There are a lot of poor people living in that area (about five hours from Austin), and they work but they’re really dirt poor. I didn’t think in America in 2005 that we had people living like that, shooting squirrels. A cot outside of your trailer and no sheet on it; and then here’s a pregnant girl who’s obviously carrying a baby that’s going to have some very high needs; I can’t see that baby going back into that environment, at least not right away. And there was an elderly man – he had an issue with something that happened to him from a surgery – he survived a war only to come back and be butchered by the knife of a surgeon and then be mistreated by the government.”

She said that some people they encountered had insurance and ways to meet their needs, “But then you go a little ways down the road and you run into this girl and her mother who had no way of even getting the handouts without someone bringing it to them.”

Ellis said she was touched by how warmly the nurse volunteers were received. “The character of those people – they have nothing, but they were just so grateful for whatever you gave them, and they were giving to you – they actually gave us more than we gave them.

“It was a great experience to meet people like that, but the sad part of it is we have these poor people in America like that, and it’s just beyond me. And then when we report this back to our government, they pull us out of there and say, ‘If you try to help these people, you’ll be there forever.’”