I wanted to pick up with the first story of the news items looking at an interesting occurrence that happened out in California. Of course California has the California Nurses Association which is actually a labor union for nurses. It’s not necessarily an organization like you might have an association for nurses in other states and the California Nurses Association has political rallies from time to time and they promote different agendas in legislative initiatives at the state level and they need people to come to those rallies and show their support so lawmakers understand the nurses in their organization, at least some of them, are interested in what’s going on in this particular legislation or whatever they’re doing.
Apparently, there was a little bit of a hubbub recently because some nurses had made the statement that they were offered continuing education credit just for coming to the rally and that didn’t seem right, it doesn’t set right with me and I would be questioning why that is. Several legislators actually got together and held a hearing on it coz hey, holding hearings are what legislators do, right? So they got together and they actually found that they couldn’t discover anyone who actually got any credit just for attending the rally but they did find out that the rally was announced along with a concurrent continuing education program on political activism and promoting your nursing agenda, even as an individual. There was a continuing education class and then along with that, there was a political activity going on afterwards and so I could see how that can be misconstrued and certainly they weren’t going to separate the two a whole lot because they wanted to get people there for the con ed and then shift them right out into the rally so, just something to be aware of.
How does your state handle this? Do you have a union representing you as a nurse and if they are, how do you feel about their political activities and how they represent you? I’d love to hear back from some of you about this. I know this is a hot-button issue so touch base with me, get back in touch with here at the Nursing Show, nursingshow@gmail.com and of course you can follow the link to this article and read it for yourself over on the website in the shownotes for this page as well.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show episode Psychological Assessment Part 2: Defense Mechanisms and Episode 146
