Letters From Your Fellow Johns Hopkins RNs
Nurses' Letter
To our fellow Johns Hopkins RNs,
It is with great excitement that the nurses of The Johns Hopkins Hospital are declaring our intent to organize a union with National Nurses United. Nurses from across the hospital and with experience levels ranging from less than a year to over thirty years share the common belief that to advance the care of our patients and to advance the nursing profession we need a collective voice. For too many years, Johns Hopkins has put nurses on the backburner either through ignoring patient safety concerns, cutting benefits, or keeping wages stagnant. We have the opportunity to change that and we hope that you will join us in the fight for our patients and for our profession.
To be clear, we reached out to National Nurses United, for their help and guidance in organizing what will be our union.
Kara's Letter
To My Fellow RNs,
My name is Kara Shanafelt and I work for the Vascular Access Team. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins Hospital in September 2014, I worked as a unionized Labor and Delivery RN in Seattle, WA at Group Health (now Kaiser). During my years at Group Health, I did not realize the benefit and protection our union granted me until arrived at Hopkins and no longer had any of those protections. In fact, if you asked me four years ago if I was pro-union, I’m not sure how I would respond. If you ask me today, after spending the last three and half years working without a union, I am emphatically in support of us forming a union at Hopkins.
Jake's Letter
Dear colleagues,
My name is Jake Zavertnik and I am an RN on Weinberg 5C. I have worked on the unit for just over two years. I love my coworkers and think overall we have a very good workplace culture on 5C. That said, I have several concerns with Kathleen Costigan’s open letter to her colleagues. She speaks with authority about unions, but I fear she is misrepresenting the facts. Below are summaries of her points, along with my response.
Sara's Letter
To anyone it may concern –
My name is Sara Kruzel (I am a BSN/RN/OCN) and I have worked here at Hopkins since the summer in the Myeloma/Transplant/Lymphoma (MTL) oncology unit which also serves as our oncology ICU. I worked on the Bone Marrow Transplant unit for a year at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) as an RN before moving to the east coast. Just as a little background information, OHSU is a teaching hospital, like Hopkins, with a medical, nursing and dentistry school. Doernbecher Children’s Hospital is part of OHSU as well. It is the #1 rated hospital in Oregon. As a nurse there, I worked under the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) as a member of a nursing union. In light of all the word going around about unionizing, the pros and the cons, I wanted to quickly share some of my experiences as a unionized nurse because they have been nothing but positive and healthy.
Katie and Derek 's Letter
To our fellow Johns Hopkins nurses:
We are nurses on Zayed 9W, the Comprehensive Transplant Unit, and we would like to share our reasons for working to organize a union of bedside nurses at Johns Hopkins. Patient safety is our number one priority for organizing. We chose to be represented by National Nurses United because NNU has a proven track record when it comes to creating safe conditions for patients and staff. NNU nurses have done this through important legislation including the only existing nurse-patient ratio law in the country in California and powerful contracts that lock in safe staffing procedures and break relief RNs. Many nurses working to organize our union have tried, unsuccessfully, to use existing shared governance structures to enact change that would improve patient safety. The majority of our requests fall on deaf ears because ultimately, without a union, administration doesn’t have to listen. When nurses’ voices are ignored, patients suffer. Patients should be the #1 priority of our hospital, but too often we see that profits are the real priority.