Tag: nurses

Join us on ANA’s Virtual Day of Advocacy – June 25!

  

ANA’s annual Membership Assembly (MA) held in June has gone virtual resulting in the cancellation of our popular Hill Day. ANA staff quickly pivoted and launched a supercharged, nationwide Virtual Day of Advocacy centered on a call to action. This Virtual Day of Advocacy will take place on June 25 – Take Action Here! Our call to action focuses on rebuilding the public health workforce and infrastructure by funding community-based care and the CDC so our nation can better withstand the COVID-19 pandemic and the next national health crisis and build towards a future of strength.

Why a Day of Advocacy? We moved to a Day of Advocacy this year which involves one call to action as opposed to the typical 3-4 legislative issues solely focused on nursing priorities. We abandoned a virtual hill day because it was not fair to ask nurses working all hours and continue to combat the COVID-19 pandemic to take time out of their day for a phone call that is extremely difficult to schedule among participants with varying schedules. The Virtual Day of Advocacy provides a much easier and public platform for nurses and nurse advocates to make their voices heard.

Who does this target? By leveraging our call to action platform, we’re able to make this much larger and all-encompassing campaign than our typical Hill Day. We also acknowledge our regular participants will miss out on the wonderful experience of a coordinated Hill visit to see their members of Congress and their staff. However, as opposed to the limitations of inviting only MA attendees, local nursing students and members from the tri-state Washington Metro area, ANA staff are able to open this campaign up through social media (RNAction Facebook and Twitter), all ANA members, nursing schools throughout the U.S. through a coordinated effort with our constituent state nurse affiliate connections so staff can drive increased participation and growth of our RNAction grassroots community. Last but not least, through a Washington Post partnership, we’ve procured advertisements for the Day of Advocacy to both members of Congress and their staff along with nurses and the general public.

Additional Information: ANA’s Policy and Government Affairs team has released a video on why advocacy is important, how to take action, personalizing your message and how to send and/or Tweet to your members of Congress.

What’s next? As you are taking action and sending your letter/tweet to Congress, please take an advocacy selfie and post that using the #RNAction hashtag or @RNAction handle. We are also asking all of those who participate in our Day of Advocacy to continue subscribing to our RNAction alerts and participate in future calls to action. COVID-19 has shown once again the impact of nursing on the overall health and well being in the U.S. We are asking all of those who join our community through this Day of Advocacy to make the commitment to not make this a one-time action. Pledge to continue advocating for nursing and amplify their voice on the national stage.

Nurses continue providing care and performing tremendous acts of kindness in the wake of this devastating pandemic. This despite varying degrees of a lack of protective equipment or resources and added strain to their families and loved ones. ANA’s Virtual Day of Advocacy provides an engaging platform for nurses, nurse advocates, nurse administrators, nursing students – and anyone interesting in promoting the nursing profession – to share their story and make their voice heard. So, share your voice and take action from now through June 25.

Protect Your Practice: Healthcare Bill will have Profound Impact on Nursing, Nurses, Patient Care

  

To many nurses around the country, the talk about healthcare reform in the nation’s capital is just that: a whole lot of talk. But if the current healthcare bill being considered by the Senate passes, are you ready for how it will impact your practice and the nursing profession as a whole?

Take hospital funding, for example. Love it or hate it, it’s a fact that “Obamacare” (or the  Affordable Care Act, “ACA”) drastically reduced the amount of money hospitals spend annually on uncompensated, or “charitable,” care.

In one state alone, Minnesota, hospitals have seen their uncompensated care costs decline by 17% since the implementation of the ACA, saving hospitals in the state about $53 million annually.

Such numbers are far from uncommon, and are probably similar where you live. The reason is simple: when more people have insurance, more people are able to pay their hospital bills. Unfortunately, the healthcare changes being considered by the Senate would leave 49 million people across the US without health insurance, once again increasing the need for hospitals to provide enormous (and enormously expensive) amounts of charitable and otherwise uncompensated care.

These increased costs will need to be accounted for in hospital budgets and will likely impact nurse staffing and care delivery—a critical issue which ANA recently addressed in a widely co-signed letter to the Center for Medicare Services.

But the healthcare bill will also impact nurses outside of the hospital setting. According to a recent survey of school administrators, over seventy percent of school districts turn to Medicaid to pay for the health professionals and school nurses needed to care for special education students. Since the senate healthcare bill would cut Medicaid spending by almost $800 billion and impose a cap on the amount of Medicaid-funded services any child could receive, school nurses and administrators are staunchly opposed to the bill.

Even if you don’t work in a hospital setting, and even if you don’t have children in school, it’s likely you will still be impacted by the healthcare bill being considered by the Senate. For example, we all have a vested interest in the health of our nation’s veterans. But of concern to veterans, VA nurses, and Veterans groups, 1.75 million vets stand to lose their Medicaid coverage under the healthcare bill, which in turn would impact the VA as more veterans seek care in that already overloaded and underfunded system.

Since Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million Americans in nursing homes, elderly Americans and nursing home nurses are also gravely concerned by the impact of the healthcare bill. The same goes for rural nurses and citizens, whose safety-net hospitals are projected to lose eighty-three percent of their net income by 2026 under the new bill.

The list goes on: whether or not you realize it, this healthcare bill will impact you and your practice, perhaps in ways that are unforeseen or unintended. That’s why the American Nurses Association is calling for a more thorough, nuanced, and bipartisan process for healthcare reform.

We urge the Senate to step back and approach this herculean task in a way that works for all Americans. For the sake of nurses and their patients, we can’t afford to get this one wrong.