National Nurses United

J U N E 2 0 1 4 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 N A T I O N A L N U R S E 7 When we last talked with Kay McVay, long- time intensive care unit RN at Kaiser Perma- nente and president emeritus of the California Nurses Association, the staff nurses of CNA had just won in 1993 a majority of seats (by one vote) on the board of directors for the very first time and hired RoseAnn DeMoro as exec- utive director. Here, McVay covers the next several critical years of CNA leadership. So what were the first years after the staff nurses won the election like? Well, we were just figuring things out. We were hiring and it takes some time to get the right people. We needed to get the nurses that we had organized. We needed to develop leaders. So what we did was a lot of internal organizing. Remember, I had been at Kaiser since 1974, and I had never seen a labor rep or my contract, for that matter. This was a huge shift, letting the staff nurses know that THEY were the important ones. That had never happened. We also launched some actions against restructuring, like our Patient Watch campaign, our lawsuit against Alta Bates when it wanted to replace all the RNs with unli- censed personnel, and Prop. 186, which would have created a single- payer health- care system in California and was one of our first efforts at getting staffing ratios. And as you started to get more organized and think about how to grow the union, what did you all realize? Well, we realized just how much money we wasted on paying our state dues to the American Nurses Association, and how we needed that money for new organizing. This was one million plus yearly, just so that the pro-ANA people could have something to put on their résumés to move up. The ANA didn't care about the bedside nurse. So what did you do? We started organizing to leave the ANA in 1995. There was so much organizing, so much meeting with and talking with people to do. We also had to work hard to recruit the right delegates to the convention. We worked our butts off. We went out and we organized, and organized, and organized, and organ- ized. And then we organized some more. So what was the debate and vote at the 1995 convention like? You know, we had done our work so I was feeling pretty confident the day of the vote. But as I was sitting up there and watching the delegates in the audience and reading everyone's body language, I started getting really antsy. Then some of the pro-ANA people got up to the microphone and started attacking us—me, RoseAnn, the other staff nurse board members—saying that we couldn't possibly know how to run the organization because we were just bedside nurses. And I could see that the audience did not like that at all. Not one bit. And we won! We left the ANA. And what happened after that? Well, once we were able to get out of the ANA, we, as nurses and staff, were able to get even more on the same page because all the pro-ANA staff left, and eventually the pro-ANA board members were voted out, too. Finally, we were able to really get to work. People were being hired and we were starting to do new organizing in Sacramento and then Los Angeles. I think within five years, we had almost regained the number of members we lost when we left the ANA. "Conversations with Kay" appears in each issue of National Nurse. Through McVay's stories, we docu- ment the origins of the modern staff RN movement as well as the changing practice and culture of nurs- ing and healthcare. The first installment appeared in the January-February 2014 issue. measure will go on the ballot in November. The new study also highlights the under- lying causes of these dangerous conditions and the industry's lack of effort to adjust nurse's patient assignments to ensure patient safety. For example: • By a 2-to-1 margin (48 percent to 23 percent), nurses report staffing level decisions are more often based on financial concerns than assessments of patient needs • 40 percent of nurses in teaching hospitals and 53 percent of those working in commu- nity hospitals report that their administra- tors are not responsive to their concerns about excessive patient assignments • And only 30 percent of nurses report that their administrators consistently adjust their patient assignments based on the needs of their patients The new survey of Massachusetts nurs- es was commissioned by the Massachusetts Nurses Association/National Nurses Unit- ed and conducted between May 8 and May 15, 2014 by Anderson Robbins Research, an independent research firm headquar- tered in Boston. The 2014 survey respon- dents were all nurses currently working in Massachusetts hospitals randomly selected from a complete file of the 92,000 nurses registered with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Nursing. —David Schildmeier Conversations with Kay

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