No one knows better than you how important that step is. Like thousands of other nurses around the country, you're tired of being overworked and underappreciated. Nurses today are forced to endure increasing insults to their professionalism and their rights at work. As hospitals focus on profits and the bottom line, in many cases nurses are the only ones left to focus on patient care and safety in the workplace. The most critical and disastrous change in health care has been the shift in ideology of hospital administrators.
Profits come at the expense of staff, supplies, and patient health.
But real change has yet to happen in many hospitals. These duties should be at the core of the nursing profession, yet more and more they are being pushed to the margins or forced out altogether. Nurses unions are a way to combat the decline and force hospitals to listen to your concerns. Tradit-ionally, unions have focused on workloads, pay, job security, and outsourcing at hospitals. But increasingly these unions have been struggling to preserve the nursing profession itself.