How National Nurses United is taking action on COVID-19

As registered nurses, we are not only frontline health care workers but also scientists, experts in the infectious disease process. And as union nurses, we are uniquely positioned to understand and speak out about what our employers and government agencies must be doing to protect health care workers, patients, and the public health of the nation.

Since we first learned of the novel coronavirus, National Nurses United, which includes California Nurses Association, has been extremely active in advocating that all health care agencies and facilities follow the precautionary principle in handling COVID-19 and act now — even before we know that something is unsafe.

We demand the highest standards and levels of protection at our workplaces from hospital system employers and our regulatory bodies. We and our patients deserve nothing less. Here’s a sampling of what we have done so far:

• Begun surveying the nation’s nurses about COVID-19 preparedness at their workplaces. If you have not taken our survey yet, please do so immediately here.
• Written to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, requesting that it strengthen its coronavirus guidelines by eliminating outdated rules, call for higher personal protective equipment standards, and urge health care facilities to increase staffing.
• Written to Vice President Mike Pence; Ambassador Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator; and all members of Congress to urge them to make policy recommendations that direct health care employers to adopt the highest level of protection for workplaces, direct the CDC to improve screening criteria and expand testing capacity, direct the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate an emergency temporary standard, ensure any COVID-19 treatment and/or vaccine is made free to the public, and encourage Congress to pass an immediate emergency spending package to fund the response to COVID-19.
• Made information requests of all of our employers where we represent health care workers, asking for their COVID-19 preparedness plans, policies, procedures and inventories of supplies, equipment, and isolation rooms. Where preparedness is lacking, nurses are advocating to fix these deficiencies.
• Written to the World Health Organization, along with 28 other nursing and health care worker organizations as part of Global Nurses United, asking the WHO to call for airborne precautions for COVID-19 and to call on employers to communicate clearly and transparently with staff.
• Written to and met with the California Department of Public Health to discuss state oversight of the preparedness of hospital facilities and state inventories of respirators and other critical supplies and equipment.
• Written to Cal-OSHA, urging the agency institute and enforce the highest standards of protection for health care workers against COVID-19.
• Issued multiple press releases and statements to the media, including a Feb. 28 statement warning that the nation’s hospitals are unprepared and failure to correct this problem quickly will lead to a national health care worker staffing crisis, and a general statement calling on health care facilities to not only get ready, but adopt a precautionary principle approach to preparedness that always errs on the side of safety.

The COVID-19 situation here in the United States and around the world is developing rapidly. NNU nurses are committed to working with health facilities and state and federal agencies to contain the spread of this disease, and we are confident we can meet that challenge, but we need the optimal staffing, supplies, and equipment to do it.