The Unscripted Nurse

I haven't been a nurse all that long really, only six years in July. July 11th, to be exact as that was the day I woke up late and stumbled half asleep and far more relaxed than I ever thought I would be into the testing center. I think that if I hadn't been half asleep I would have been terrified.

When I started working after that day six years wouldn't have been so great an amount of experience. Not when I was surrounded by people with 10, 20 or even 30 years of experience. That's not the case anymore and I am frightened to realize that my six years makes me a person of experience in my hospital, if not on my specific unit. We can discuss until we're dead all of the reasons for this but in the end it comes down to the simple fact that nurses have simply had enough. Enough being called heroes and angles. Enough accepting poor treatment from employers and patients alike. Enough of watching the healthcare industry benefit from our labor at the cost of our wellbeing and the wellbeing of those in our care. And because the world had shown us time and time again that we were powerless to effect change those who could left.

And now here we are, with a healthcare system on the verge of collapse and an industry insisting that by adhering to the practices that brought us to this threshold all will be set right. Here we are with overflowing ERs and ever increasing nurse to patient ratios, ever decreasing reimbursement rates, and expanding standards of care that are impossible to meet.

I haven't been a nurse for long, but I've been one long enough to know the difference between good healthcare and bad and to get angry about it.

What about you? Are you angry yet? Are you angry enough to do something about it?

The history of nursing and unionism is a convoluted one and I won't go into it here. But I will say that at its core, whatever the group, unionism was born of the desire to make things better. To utilize the strength and value of our labor to effect changes we could never hope for on our own. And if there was ever a time for nurses to embrace that, it is now when we are more connected than we have ever been. When we are able to amplify our voices and bring attention to the disastrous consequences wrought upon the health of the public through the practices of healthcare organizations focused solely on their own profit. By insurance companies and regulatory bodies seemingly committed to throwing up increasingly unscalable barriers between people and the healthcare they need.

Nurses were denied the right to unionize longer than police officers because they were deemed too important to the public good. And yet, those in charge of making decisions about healthcare do not solicit our input and they try as hard as they can to speak over us when we dare to raise our voices.

Yet I believe that we are more powerful than we know and have the ability to bring about real and lasting changes to our healthcare system. Doing so is going to require us to be bold, to change how we think of ourselves, how we let others think of us. We have the mechanisms in place, try as hard as they did to keep us away from unionizing unionize we did. And now it is time for us to do something with that.

I believe that nurses have the knowledge and strength to change US healthcare for the better. I believe that this is the time to do so. I believe that the voice of every nurse, even if it is a dissenting voice, should be heard. I believe that WSNA is our union and it's time for us to embrace that and all that it means. And I believe that I can help do that, I would at least like the chance to try.

Many more skilled than I have tried to give me talking points, to keep me on message as it were, and failed. So, I am not going to promise you that I will always be eloquent, that I will always say or do the right thing. Yet I am going to promise you to be wholly and authentically committed to the cause of improving the working conditions for nurses in the entirety of Washington state and, in turn, to promoting the best outcomes possible for those in our care. I don't know how to do anything else.