Nurses: Heal yourselves and your profession
By LENORE BORIS, RN
Nurses Week — May 6-12 — ends on Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
The famous “first nurse” saw nurses as advocates for ensuring that the basic elements of healing are available to patients.
Advocating for patients is a role PEF nurses have mastered. But the nursing profession also needs some healing.
Mandatory overtime, short staffing, lagging salaries and dwindling ranks are signs of an ailing profession. These difficult conditions are demoralizing, physically grueling and diminish our ability to provide quality care.
Remember the safety briefing given on airlines: “Secure your oxygen mask on your own face, before helping others to put on their masks.” The idea, of course, is that you will not be able to help others if you do not take care of yourself first.
Advocating for ourselves first is the way we can ensure nurses are available to care for others.
We should acknowledge and celebrate our efforts on behalf of our patients during Nurses Week. We have worked hard and deserve the recognition.
But we should also use this time to help people understand the challenges nurses face. We should encourage people to support efforts to ease short staffing, recruit people into nursing and improve salaries.
In fact, that’s just the example PEF’s Statewide Nurses Committee is setting. Working behind the scenes on behalf of all PEF nurses, the committee members are involved in too many activities to list here, but a few can be highlighted.
On March 14, for instance, the committee coordinated the second annual PEF Nurses Lobby Day at the Capitol in Albany. PEF Nurses lobbied legislators on five health-care bills.
But the Lobby Day is just a small part of what the committee has been doing to achieve legislation on mandatory overtime and staffing. It is working with PEF Vice President Ken Brynien, who heads the union’s legislative and political-action efforts, to build coalitions of support for improved staffing levels. Recently, PEF met with representatives from other health-care-employee unions and the NYS Nurses Association to discuss the need for staffing legislation.
Meanwhile, the committee has been working to help nurses on the job.
Last year, it developed a multi-agency Protest of Assignment (POA) form which is now available to all PEF nurses. Not only does the form help nurses fight abuses at their workplace, it allows statewide data collection that the committee will use to monitor and resolve this serious work-place concern for PEF nurses.
And, for the last two years, the Nurses Committee has coordinated a Nurse Luncheon at the annual PEF convention. This is a terrific opportunity for PEF nurses active at their own worksites to meet and network with nurses from throughout the state.
So, enjoy the recognition of Nurses Week. Then, follow the lead of the Nurses Committee to expand on the lessons Florence Nightingale taught us about advocacy.
Nursing and, ultimately, your patients will benefit when you take care of yourself and your profession, first.
Attention:
PEF nurses be on the lookout for:
Nurses
News! —
a new quarterly publication for PEF nurses.
Description: Seven pages of news for PEF nurses, armed
with a returnable survey for nurses providing direct
patient care.
Last seen: At PEF headquarters in preparation for
delivery to nursing worksites throughout the state during
April.
If sighted: Read the news, then complete and return the
survey. Contact PEF nurse organizer Lenore Boris at lboris@pef.org at PEF headquarters
with your comments and suggestions for future issues.