Texas Becoming a Major "Hotspot" for the National Nurses Movement

by: National Nurses Shum

Wed May 06, 2009 at 00:16 PM CDT

But it has.

Over the last few years, a genuine national nurses movement has coalesced, giving RNs a collective voice at long last.  150,000 nurses have come together in a new form of patient advocacy.

And now Texas nurses are building their own nurses movement, from the ground up, with NNOC-Texas, the National Nurses Organizing Committee-Texas.  Texas has become one of the real hotspots for the national nurses movement, and so far over 10,000 RNs (!!) have participated in some form of activism, whether that's organizing their facility, marching on the state Capitol, or phonebanking legislators.

In Austin, nurses are pushing a bill to mandate safe RN-to-patient ratios, which is the key issue of the national nurses movement, as well as to provide whistle-blower protections for RNs who report unsafe care situations.

And, as the Fort Worth Weekly reports today, NNOC-Texas members are standing up for safe patient care at JPS, the county's public hospital.

They didn't do it without fear. In fact, one petition organizer said every ER nurse he spoke to supported the petition's aims {of improving care standards at the facility}; the ones who declined to sign did so out of fear for their careers. Every nurse interviewed by Fort Worth Weekly for this story said that people in their profession live with the constant threat of retaliation if they raise concerns. In Texas, they have a phrase for one such tactic. It's called being "Group One'd," referring to the name of an organization that does background checks on hospital employees and, so nurses believe, is responsible for blacklisting anyone who speaks up.  

Check out the whole article for the inside story of a resurgent Texas labor movement that is inspiring RNs across the country.