Some 250 registered nurses at Sierra Medical Center in El Paso are the latest group of Texas nurses to vote to join the National Nurses Organizing Committee-Texas (NNOC-Texas), the Texas affiliate of National Nurses United (NNU). Sierra RN Nena Brown said the election:

Is a mandate by nurses at Sierra who are determined to improve the quality of patient care and be the strongest possible advocates for our patients and our community.

When nurses are forced to carry a heavy patient load because of understaffing, the first to suffer are the patients. Several speakers at a Washington, D.C., City Hall press conference Monday said that legislation to establish a nurse-to-patient safe staffing ratio would protect patients’ safety and care.

Registered nurses at Providence Memorial Hospital in El Paso, Texas, voted by nearly 2-to-1 last week to join the National Nurses Organizing Committee-Texas, the Texas affiliate of National Nurses United (NNU). NNOC-Texas will represent some 500 RNs at the hospital. 

Some 4,500 RNs at 11 San Francisco Bay area hospitals—including 10 Sutter Health facilities—are holding a one-day strike today to dramatize the highly profitable health care chain’s demand for more than 100 sweeping reductions in patient care, community health services and nurse standards and workplace conditions. Sutter Health has made $4.2 billion in profits over the past five years, pays its CEO $4 million a year after a 215 percent raise and gives 21 top executives $1 million or more a year.

This is National Nurses Week and National Nurses United (NNU) is sending out “a simple THANK YOU” to the nation’s 3.1 million registered nurses because:

Your work is not easy. You must have compassion and endurance to be there in the middle of the night, when your patient is struggling with pain. You must have patience and courage to fight that bureaucratic red tape that’s delaying your patient’s medications from the hospital pharmacy.

Today, some 4,500 RNs at eight Sutter Health hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area are holding a one-day strike to dramatize the highly profitable health care chain’s demand for more than 100 sweeping reductions in patient care, nurse standards and workplace conditions.

Some 4,500 RNs at eight Sutter Health Bay Area hospitals will hold a one-day strike May 1 to dramatize the highly profitable health care chain’s demand for more than 100 sweeping reductions in patient care and nurses’ standards and workplace conditions. Sutter Health has made $4.2 billion in profits over the past five years, pays its CEO $4 million a year after a 215 percent raise and pays 21 top executives $1 million or more a year.

This is a crosspost from LMPartnership.org by John August, Executive Director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.

Unions that are seeking to transform the role of frontline workers in health care organizations know that real change will take more than a high level of employee engagement. It will also take a different type of relationship between managers, physicians and workers. Real, sustainable change will require union members, managers and physicians to commit themselves to a social dialogue that creates more value for the patients and communities we serve.

More than 60,000 lives could be saved over the next three years under a new initiative announced today by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that would stop millions of preventable injuries and complications in hospital patient care over the next three years.