National Nurses United

Registered Nurse April 2009

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RNs in Office:2 4/22/09 5:47 PM Page 14 As an RN on the Berkeley City Council, Max Anderson worries about public health and health disparities in the communities he represents. R egistered nurses are naturally popular among the public, making it possible – as Anderson's experience shows – for nurses with little or no political experience to run for office and win. Campaign managers would love to buy for their candidates what RNs automatically command: the public's trust. A 2008 USA Today/Gallup poll ranked the honesty and ethics of nurses above all other professions for the seventh straight year. When Carole Rogers, an RN with a master's degree in public health, first ran for a position on the Eden Township Healthcare District Board of Directors, a body governing hospitals near Castro Valley, Calif., she attended a crab feed with some of the incumbents running for reelection. According to Rogers, they told her, "Oh, Carole, you have an R-N after your name. Everyone's going to vote for you immediately." In fact, Rogers was the top vote-getter in the 2006 election. Anderson had a similar experience while campaigning. "The people love us," she said. "When you tell them you're a nurse, they're just mesmerized. They'll stop everything and talk to you." RNs may wonder whether they're cut out for holding elected office. Rogers discovered that she, like all nurses, can tap into a wealth of critical thinking and creative management experience even when away from the bedside. 14 REGISTERED NURSE In the late 1970s, when Rogers was the first CEO of the Contra Costa Health Plan, the first county-sponsored health maintenance organization in the country, she came up with a novel solution to help one patient who suffered from severe asthma. "During the summer he would always have to be hospitalized because he lived in a trailer without air conditioning or insulation," remembered Rogers. "I convinced the management team at the Contra Costa Health Plan to buy him an air conditioner. He didn't get overheated, was able to filter the air, so it kept him out of the hospital. There were a lot of instances like that where the team got really creative. The concept of a health maintenance organization [should not be] to pay medical bills, but to keep people healthy." Anderson likened tackling a problem in her new board position to the process of assessing a patient. "I'm finding out that's basically what politics is," she said. "You gather all the information and use your critical thinking skills and make the best choice." Empathy is a quality perhaps sorely missing from our elected officials today, but registered nurses can also inject a humane perspective into problem-solving and into politics. "Nurses are not just thinking about cost-cutting," said Anderson. "They're thinking patients first, people first." W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G APRIL 2009

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