NY Nurse November 2016

When Super Storm Sandy hit New York, NYSNA’s nurses stood ready to save lives. Their heroic efforts made a lasting impression on journalist Sarah Jaffe. Among the movers and shakers featured in Jaffe’s new book, “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt,” are NYSNA’s nurses, who the author chronicles for their leadership roles among public health professionals both during the storm and in it’s wake.

To cries of “Sign the bill!”, the Save Our Safety Net Campaign held an educational forum in the lobby of Harlem Hospital on November 15 to urge Governor Cuomo to ink his name to the all-important Enhanced Safety Net Hospital bill (A.9476-A/S.6948-A) passed unanimously in the legislature in June.

This is a critical moment, when religious and racial discrimination are on the rise, threatening violence,” said Anne Bové, RN and President of NYSNA’s NYC H+H/Mayorals Executive Council. “Our public hospitals have a long tradition of serving all New Yorkers, no matter who they are or what their care needs. Our mission is to provide a ‘safe haven of care’ and we will not be deterred.”

The vote is in… the ballots are counted… and there are some big wins for NYSNA in the New York State Legislature. Some, like State Senator Todd Kaminsky, D-District 9, fought hard with the help of NYSNA to keep their seats. Others, like Senator-elect Marisol Alcantara, D-District 31, the first NYSNA staffer ever elected to State office, will hit the halls of Albany for the first time, bringing fresh energy to pressing legislative battles, such as safe staffing, fair funding for safety net hospitals, and the preservation of a strong public health system.

Nurses know better than anyone that the American food industry has contributed to an epidemic of obesity and hypertension unprecedented in recent history through unfettered advertising, food additives and mono-crops. If we fail to address the devastating impacts of ‘Big Food’ then this could also become a nation whose population is also facing a wellness crisis.

NYSNA nurses celebrated this November when the last of key contracts at Catholic Health Services of Long Island (CHS) were overwhelmingly ratified and safer staffing won the day. Safe staffing has been a top priority for NYSNA nurses at St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center and St. Charles Hospital, where nurses overloaded with patients have struggled daily to provide the highest quality care. A third CHS hospital — St. Joseph Hospital — had already signed on for safe staffing and other NYSNA demands in June. The November agreements sealed the deal with CHS.

A recent nurse graduate in my facility approached me the other day, confiding her worries regarding nightmares she was having about work. The dreams mostly centered on bad outcomes for her patients or emergencies she couldn’t handle. She would always wake up with the sense that she forgot to do something in her previous shift or inadvertently made some fatal error.

I told her not to worry, that such dreams were fairly common for new nurses and would pop up time and again throughout her career. Then I had to think about that.

Steward training is about building power. It’s about learning to organize to solve problems on the job and to affect change statewide. Here’s what some of the hundreds of NYSNA members who have already taken the training have to say about it. We hope you’ll be next.

“I learned a lot about how to work collaboratively as a team of nurses to resolve issues and concerns. All of us are the union. It’s a brother-sister thing. If there’s a problem, we need to help one another. The struggle continues. We need to take a more active role to affect change.”

The push toward greater health information technology undermines our nursing practice and often hurts the patients we care for and about. Our mission is to heal the sick and to advocate on their behalf. Machines are important in healthcare, obviously, but they also can get in the way.

The nursing process involves several steps. We gather information about our patients, assess their condition, diagnose, provide care, and evaluate changes over time. Our work is not static because patients aren’t. Conditions change and we respond accordingly, and quickly.