Tell Congress: We demand nurses are protected during COVID-19.
Sign the petition below to tell Congress, “I stand with nurses, and I demand that you do everything in your power to ensure they are protected from COVID-19, because all of our lives depend on it.”
A message from a nurse on the front lines of COVID-19:
My name is Cathy Kennedy. I have been a registered nurse for 40 years — at Kaiser in Roseville, California for 38 of those years. My facility is the hospital where the first COVID-19 patient in California died on March 4.
You would think that back in early February, when we nurses started asking management to communicate openly, and to give us the training, staffing, and personal protective equipment (PPE) that we need, they would have done all of the above. They did not. When that first patient died, they could have taken our requests seriously — but they did not.
Now, as we face an unprecedented crisis, we’re still fighting to get what we need to care for our patients safely. And we need your voice right now.
Kaiser Roseville nurses are not alone. From what we are hearing, nurses across the country are not getting the staffing, PPE, education, communication, and isolation rooms we need. And government agencies are not holding hospitals accountable for providing these things; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently weakened its guidelines on infectious disease protections for health care workers — during a pandemic!
Our big fear is that hospitals will become disease vectors instead of centers of healing. And then who will care for our patients, when we nurses succumb to the disease or get sidelined?
Nurses face the unknown every day at work. So we are not afraid to care for our patients — if we have the protections we need to do our job. Nurses ask people across America to stand with us now, during COVID-19, as we demand to be protected, so that we can protect our patients and communities, in turn.
In solidarity,
Cathy Kennedy, RN
Vice President, National Nurses United
