Hi, I’m Michelle, and as one of the nurses on our Nurse Advisory Council coordinating our discussions with the Department of Health, I wanted to update you on our work.
On Thursday, over 150 nurses from across PA had another great conversation about seizing this moment to advocate for safe staffing and other safety needs in the Covid-19 moment.
We have two basic paths to advocating for our Plan for PA’s Recovery. One is working directly with the Governor’s administration and the Department of Health, and one is working through the legislature. Today I want to focus on our work with the administration.
As you know we’ve met twice with Secretary Levine and leadership from the Department of Health about our concerns and our platform. Those meetings have now resulted in one big victory: Governor Wolf’s Executive Order forcing hospitals to make progress on many of the things we demanded.
We also know that we’re far from achieving safe staffing and patient safety and we want to really push with the Department to work with us more deeply and in a more timely way.
Our third call with the Department is coming up next week. Click here to RSVP for the next Nurse Advisory Council meeting with the Department of Health on Wednesday at 3PM. As a reminder, these meetings are open to all nurses, but with short time and thousands of nurses, the best time to weigh in and be sure your voice is heard is in the meetings amongst ourselves like last night’s, or by filling or this form to share with the Nurse Advisory Council. Right now our agenda for the 17th is as follows:
- Understand the new guidelines, point out where they fall short, and strategize about making sure every hospital is following them. We want to focus on policy and procedures to hold hospitals and all facilities accountable to the Department of Health’s guidelines.
- Discuss the Department’s plans for contact tracing in their policies they’ve put out so far.
Again, you can click here to submit feedback on this or other topics to the Nurse Advisory Council.
That’s enough for one post, but next week we’ll want to bear down on creating legislative champions — or finding out who needs to be out of the legislature. Click here to read the 6 Step Guide to Get Your Elected Official to Advocate with Us for our #NursePlatform.
Sincerely,
Michelle Boyle RN
Nurse Advisory Council Member
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