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Profile:FINAL 10/15/08 11:09 PM Page 14 With Might and Maine mau re e n caristi, rn is reviving her state's nurses movement in the fight for ratios and single-payer healthcare. by luc ia hwang s a young woman, Maureen Caristi always thought the United States enjoyed a top-notch healthcare system, but that was until she had the chance to travel abroad and see how other countries run things. In the 1970s, she worked for a doctor in Germany and observed how providers gave efficient, but personal, care to patients in that country. Acting like a small-town doctor, the physician handled cases within a defined area of Berlin, setting aside a portion of each morning for urgent cases, seeing mothers and babies on certain days, treating adults on other days, and even making house calls to the elderly or those who were unable to come into his office. No money changed hands nor payments discussed; residents just showed their national health card. "This guy was your family doctor," said Caristi, an RN in the respiratory and thoracic surgery unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Me. "He knew you from birth to dust. I think that's where the seeds began of my support for single-payer healthcare." Caristi is dedicated to creating a healthcare system in the United States that offers the type of comprehensive care she saw in Europe and that she would like to be able to give as a registered nurse. The best way to change our broken system, she believes, is for registered nurses to work through their unions to organize more nurses, push for better contracts and working conditions for RNs, lobby for patient protections such as RN staffing ratios, and ultimately pass national single-payer legislation. Today, Caristi heads the Maine State Nurses Association, which affiliated with CNA/NNOC in 2007, and is also a member of the CNA/NNOC board of directors. Caristi grew up in Maine in an extended family of teachers, but knew early on that she wanted to be a nurse. Her younger sister was often sick as a child, and doctors would visit their house to give her sister injections. The little girl would burst into tears and hide, and Caristi remembers thinking how incompassionate the medical staff was in handling her sister's fear, and how she could, and would, do it better. "I just was always trying to protect her from those shots," she said. 14 REGISTERED NURSE She started working first as a certified nurse assistant and then as a licensed practical nurse for 20 years before she returned to school and earned her RN license in 1988. Her father had always been a union man and she participated "on the fringes" in her union mainly W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G OCTOBER 2008