Big Labor Fights To Protect Bad Nurses

by | May 13, 2010 | Labor Relations Ink

The California Nurses Association (now folded into the United American Nurses super-union) continually promotes mandated nurse/patient ratios based almost solely on the argument that it is in the best interests of the patient. Unfortunately, it is quite obvious that patient care is far from the list of foremost concerns of the nurses union, or any other union for that matter. The Chamber of Commerce neatly sums up the latest travesty perpetrated upon the California public by Big Labor:

ProPublica and the L.A. Times have published the results of a joint investigation into the failed oversight of California’s health professionals, finding underfunding, omitted criminal background checks, failure to monitor those placed on probation and even failure to act against nurses whose egregious misconduct had already been thoroughly documented and sanctioned by other government agencies, including loss of licenses by other states. While the system failed, many with sordid pasts continued working for years, continuing to hurt trusting patients, because their Board of Registered Nursing records remained spotless. California employers are not required to report nurses guilty of malfeasance and the state lacks the tools to track those nurses who violate the public trust. Governor Schwarzenegger was so distraught that he sacked the entire Board. The new Board began fingerprint screening, discovering registered nurses who had been convicted of murder, sex offenses, robbery and assault. Schwarzenegger reached across the aisle and asked a democratic State Senator to carry a bill, SB 1111, to remedy the situation. Primarily, it simply extends to nurses, dentists, pharmacists, psychologists, optometrists, chiropractors and veterinarians the same patient protections and disclosure provisions that have long been in place for doctors.

The SEIU and the nurses unions in the state are fighting fiercely to oppose the bill. The nurses unions are also up in arms about the implementation of Health Information Technology. Rather than using the latest technological advances to increase patient care, they are afraid of losing union dues-paying members. According to this 24-page document put out by the CNA-NNOC in 2009, “healthcare IT is driven by the desire of employers to control workers, that EMRs are used to spy on employees, and that technology is intended to homogenize health professionals and patients like interchangeable machine parts.” In yet another struggle against modernization in the face of validated test programs, nurses unions in California are opposing a pilot program in the state for “universal beds.” The concept is that rather than moving a patient from room to room – or sometimes even from floor to floor – as their conditions warrant, the rooms are adaptable to the conditions and needs of the patient. Where this has been tested elsewhere, the results have been strongly positive. The CNA is, of course, against the pilot program. Protecting criminals and bad nurses, avoiding the implementation of the best possible technology, and refuting the results of new best-practices – I can only imagine what our healthcare will look like as government and unions continue to collude to take over more of our system.

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