Profile_1 10/5/10 2:44 PM Page 26
Always Fighting
Through bad
ratios, hospital
restructuring,
and a debilitating
back injury,
RN Beth Piknick
keeps on keeping
for nurses.
By Lucia Hwang
26
N AT I O N A L N U R S E
B
eth piknick is a fighter. As an intensive care
unit RN, she challenged supervisors and the chief
of medicine over short staffing. As a nurse activist
with the Massachusetts Nurses Association back in
the 1980s, she struggled against elitism to create a
real union for bedside staff nurses. When she hurt
her back so badly in 1992 that she had to stop
working and undergo back surgery, Piknick fought to get back to
nursing and hands-on patient care. And when the opportunity arose
last year to create a national movement of registered nurses, Piknick
helped fellow nurse leaders overcome naysayers to make National
Nurses United a reality.
"I'm excited to finally be a part of a national group of 155,000
nurses that want to do the same thing as I do: protect our patients,
take care of patients, and take care of the future of our profession,"
said Piknick, a member of the NNU Executive Council and the
immediate past president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
"I'm also excited that the hospital industry fears us. And they should
fear us, because people respect us more than them."
There's no one life-changing moment that made Piknick want to be
a registered nurse. There were no nurses in her family, no ill relatives
requiring care. "I just remember always wanting to do it," said Piknick.
After graduating from nursing school, Piknick quickly found a
home for herself in the intensive care unit of Cape Cod Hospital in
Hyannis, Mass., where she has worked since 1972. She first got
W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G
SEPTEMBER 2010
