National Nurses United

NATIONAL NURSE,™ (ISSN 2153-0386 print /ISSN 2153-0394 online) The Voice of National Nurses United, July/August 2014 Volume 110/5 is pub- lished by National Nurses United, 2000 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94612- 2908. It provides news of organizational activities and reports on developments of concern to all registered nurses across the nation. It also carries general cover- age and commen tary on matters of nurs- ing practice, community and public health, and healthcare policy. It is pub- lished monthly except for combined issues in January and Febru- ary, and July and August. Periodicals postage paid at Oakland, California. POSTMASTER: send address changes to National Nurse, ™ 2000 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94612-2908. To send a media release or announce- ment, fax (510) 663-0629. National Nurse™ is carried on the NNU website at www.nationalnursesunited.org. For permission to reprint articles, write to Editorial Office. To subscribe, send $40 ($45 foreign) to Subscription Department. Please contact us with your story ideas They can be about practice or manage- ment trends you've observed, or simply something new you've encountered in the profession. They can be about one nurse, unit, or hospital, or about the wider landscape of healthcare policy from an RN's perspective. They can be humorous, or a matter of life and death. If you're a writer and would like to contribute an article, please let us know. You can reach us at nationalnurse@nationalnursesunited.org EXECUTIVE EDITOR RoseAnn DeMoro EDITOR Lucia Hwang GRAPHIC DESIGN Jonathan Wieder COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR Charles Idelson CONTRIBUTORS Gerard Brogan, RN, Hedy Dumpel, RN, JD, Jan Rabbers, Donna Smith, David Schildmeier, Ann Kettering Sincox PHOTOGRAPHY Jaclyn Higgs, Tad Keyes, Erin FitzGerald we have a saying in the labor movement to emphasize how important it is for unions to care about environmental issues and to never pit the prospect of work against doing what's right for the earth: There are no jobs on a dead planet. We'd like to add that there are also no patients on a dead planet. There are no nurses, no US, on a dead plan- et. In recent years, as climate change accelerates and our patients keep getting rarer and rarer cancers and coming down with asthma at younger and younger ages, it becomes more and more apparent that the end game for our life's work as healthcare professionals may be all about fighting for a healthy and sustainable environ- ment. Many of our RN members intuitively understand this and are already active against the energy industry's plans to frack, drill, and burn us into extinction. In this issue's feature story on the role of registered nurses in the environmental justice movement, we explain where things are at, what's at stake, and how registered nurses are stepping forward to protect human health at both the beginning and end stages of environmental destruction by trying to prevent pollution as well as treating victims of pollution. As many of our nurs- es attest, working to create a healthy environment and being a registered nurse is a natural fit and simply makes sense. Also in this issue, we present our annual book reviews special, where we take a spin through titles relating to health- care, science, and even history that might be of particular interest to registered nurses. The books this year range from one that's drawn in cartoon form about the last years of the author's aging parents, to one about how machines and automation are dumbing us down and contributing to social inequality, to a really stellar one about the little-known story of a group of Army and Navy nurses who worked on World War II's front lines and were captured as prisoners of war by the Japanese. We hope one, or some, of these titles pique your interest enough to read more. Lastly, don't overlook the stories in the news section. One is about nurses standing up as public health advocates for Detroit residents who are getting their water shut off (basically for being low income), and another tells the heartbreaking and infuriating story of how 6-month-old California baby Jenevieve died because Kaiser Permanente refused to keep an inpatient pediatrics unit open near her home. Almost 19,000 Kaiser RNs have entered bargaining to restore and prevent service cuts such as this. We hope you had a good summer and a chance to relax. The fall is fast approaching and we nurses have a lot of work to do. It's time to get busy again. Deborah Burger, RN | Karen Higgins, RN | Jean Ross, RN National Nurses United Council of Presidents Letter from the Council of Presidents Stay connected FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/NationalNurses TWITTER: @RNmagazine, @NationalNurses FLICKR: www.flickr.com/nationalnursesunited YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/NationalNursesUnited DIGITAL MAGAZINE: NationalNurseMagazine.org

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