Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/877799
NATIONAL NURSE,™ (USPS publication permit number 0807-560/ISSN 2153-0386 print/ISSN 2153-0394 online) The Voice of National Nurses United, July-August-Sep- tember 2017 (Volume 113/4) is published by National Nurses United, 155 Grand Avenue, Oakland, CA 94612-2908. It provides news of or ganizational activities and reports on developments of concern to all registered nurses across the nation. It also carries gen- eral coverage and commen tary on matters of nursing practice, community and public health, and healthcare policy. It is published five times per year, with combined issues in January-February, March-April, May-June, July-August-September, and October- November-December. Periodicals postage paid at Oakland, California. POSTMASTER: send address changes to National Nurse, ™ 155 Grand Avenue, 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 Barb Brady, Gerard Brogan, RN, PHOTOGRAPHY Jaclyn Higgs, Tad Keyes, Choppy Oshiro, Kate Usher it's been a cruel, cruel sum- mer. Uncontrollable wildfires are burning throughout much of the American Northwest. Hurricanes Harvey, then Irma, devastated Houston and much of the Gulf of Mexico. The scale of human suffering is hard to fathom. But no matter the degree, nurses will always be there. After Harvey, our disaster-relief project, Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), put out the call for nurse volunteers, and nearly 2,000 people signed up. As of mid September, we have teams of RN members helping staff the medical clinic of Houston's NRG Center, where a massive shelter is housing thou- sands of residents flooded out of their homes. Read more about our Texas nurses' experience with Harvey in this issue. In San Francisco, about 20 extremely vulnerable patients being cared for in the subacute unit of St. Luke's Hospital are also facing losing their homes; Sutter Health, the hospital corporation that owns the facility, wants to completely shut down the unit and leave a major metropoli- tan city without one single subacute bed. Sutter wants the patients to relocate to other facilities potentially hundreds of miles away, far from their loved ones and support net- works. Our nurse members are joining with patients' fami- lies to fight the closure tooth and nail. They have already won a public commitment by Sutter to keep caring for the patients as long as they need, but this arrangement is not a long-term solution to the dearth of subacute beds in their city. There are still bright spots: nurses with two hospitals in California voted by landslide votes to unionize this sum- mer; Minnesota nurses cleverly bought and forgave mil- lions of dollars in medical debt; we have one of our best RN activists, Dotty Nygard, running for Congress; and Sen. Bernie Sanders just introduced the Medicare for All Act, S. 1804, in the Senate with more than 15 cosponsors! You can read all about these events in this issue. And, as we do every year, this issue includes our annual book review special. There are some real must-reads on this list, so check it out. One title of note is Naomi Klein's No Is Not Enough. Klein is a great friend and ally of NNU and so clearly articulates a world economic and social system based on nurses' values of caring that, really, this book should be required reading for every nurse activist. Let's dream big. Deborah Burger, RN | Jean Ross, RN National Nurses United Co-presidents Letter from the NNU 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