fbpx

Here’s the plan we discussed on last night’s Nurses of PA Statewide Call:

Oct 25, 2019 | Updates

Last week for our Safe Patient Limits Call-In Week, we targeted 7 key Senators on the Senate Health Committee who didn’t yet support safe patient limits to get as many nurses in their districts to call them as we could. Our goal was to step up the pressure, and make sure they’re hearing from more and more of the nurses in their districts.

Why? Because we think we can get the votes to pass the legislation in the Senate if we can get it to come up for a vote. But before it can get voted on by the full Senate, the 11 Senators in the Health Committee have to vote to send it out of the Health Committee, so those 7 were holding it up for everyone.

Here’s what we did last week:

  • 32 nurses completed 42 phonebank shifts last week and made 15,000 calls.
  • Through that work we were able to connect 200 nurses to the 7 Target Senators who sit on the Senate Healthcare Committee, and another 200 agreed to call later. 
  • The most exciting part about that is that we gained a new Senate Cosponsor (Senator Judy Schwank) which now brings us to 24 Cosponsors in the Senate of 50, and 5 out of 11 Senators in the Senate Health Committee!

This is amazing work and a big step forward, but we still have 6 Senators out of 11 on the Committee that don’t support Senate Bill 450, so we need to step up the pressure!

At the same time, we need to keep speaking out for safe staffing in nursing homes too!

So here’s the plan we discussed on last night’s call:

  1. The week of December 2nd – December 6th, we’re going to deliver all the tens of thousands of petitions we have to the offices of the 6 Senators on the Health Committee who don’t yet support safe patient limits, and the Governor (who does support, but it doesn’t hurt to remind him how important this is.)
  2. We’re going to keep working on getting 2,000 letters sent to the Governor about the importance of increasing the long-term care standard to 4.1 hours per patient per day.
  3. We need to fund this movement so we can have the resources to keep building this work.

Friend, you live in one of the 6 target districts. If you’re committed committed to pressuring your Senator, how you can help is by signing up to organize a petition delivery. 

If you live in one of the six target districts (Sen. Michele Brooks, SD50; Sen. Judy Ward, SD30; Sen. Joe Scarnati, SD25; Sen. Bob Mensch, SD24; Sen. Scott Hutchinson, SD 21; Sen. Scott Martin, SD13) – if you live in one of those districts and you’re committed to pressuring your Senator, you’re going to work to setup a time for the petition delivery, work with other nurses in the area interested in organizing the delivery, and then call and text nurses in the district to get a big crowd to show up.

If you don’t live in one of those six target districts and you’re committed to helping pressure those Senators who are holding all of us back, what you can do is help us to keep reaching more nurses in those districts through phone banking, and adopt a district to help with the planning of a petition delivery.

I’m so excited to be in this movement with all of you, 

Claudia Crane RN
Nurses of PA

Sign up to help organize petition deliveries.