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worst) for preventable patient readmis- sions and certain types of preventable infections. Eighty percent of Massachusetts hospitals are currently being penalized by the federal government for excessive rates of Medicare readmissions and nearly half (47 percent) are being assessed for value or quality-of-care-related penalties, according to Peter Arno, a senior fellow and director of health policy research at the Political Economy Research Institute at the Univer- sity of Massachusetts-Amherst. Arno testified that "the overwhelming weight of the evidence strongly suggests that improving nurse staffing levels is a key factor in promoting high-quality patient care and safety…Raising inpatient nurse staffing levels, which have been demon- strated to improve quality of care, is a moral, political, and economic imperative whose time has come." —Joe Markman MASSACHUSETTS N ina pham, a Dallas ICU regis- tered nurse, was the first person to con tract Ebola on U.S. soil. Last fall she was infected after treating a Liberian man who later died from Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. In a pending lawsuit, Pham says that the hospital failed to properly train and equip her and other nurses, leading to Ebola exposure. Pham told her story to RNs from across Massachusetts on Oct. 9 at the 2015 Massachusetts Nurses Associa- tion Convention in Hyannis. She joined Sean Kaufman, a former specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Infection and a bio-security expert who taught infec- tion control techniques to staff at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, which treat- ed Ebola patients last year. As part of Pham's presentation, she told nurses about the four things she is asking for after sur - viving Ebola: transparency, empathy, accountability, and change. "I want the leaders of the hospitals to be transparent about the risks in volved," Pham said. "I want them to ask themselves if they would do the same things they are asking us to do. In nursing school, we get taught that we should advocate for our patients, and today I want us to advocate for ourselves." —Joe Markman O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5 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 5 Nina Pham speaks about Ebola experience at Massachusetts convention