Recognizing National Nurses Week
Floor Speech
RECOGNIZING NATIONAL NURSES WEEK -- (House of Representatives - May 12, 2009)
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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague and physician from the Virgin Islands for yielding to me. I rise in strong support of H. Res. 192, a resolution in recognition of National Nurses Week.
I too would like to thank Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson for introducing this bill, along with Representative Lois Capps and Representative Carolyn McCarthy, all nurses in this body, for sponsoring this resolution and for their steadfast commitment to honoring nurses and highlighting the importance of estimated 2.9 million nurses to our health care system.
As we move forward with health care reform discussions, we must continue to listen to nurses. Nurses will fight for improving patient access to quality care. And it is nurses who will advocate for more preventive and primary care providers to help reduce the need for costly inpatient care. And it is nurses who will fight for appropriate nurse staffing ratios to reduce medical error and to cut down on the number of readmissions to hospitals.
We all know about the shortages in primary care professionals, especially nurses right now; and as we move toward health care reform and bring more people into the system, we certainly are going to need more nurses.
There are about 500,000 nurses out there who have left the profession for many, many reasons, but one of them is because they have very stressful working conditions.
So as we celebrate National Nurses Week, we need to think about that. One of those issues is to reduce the number of patients that each nurse has to take care of these days. The patient/nurse ratio is so high, there are so many patients that they have to take care of, that many have just said, Can't do it.
And so I think the best way we honor nurses is to look at ways we make conditions in the hospitals, in their workplace, much more amenable to them because they are the frontline people.
Right now when our loved ones have to go to the hospital, many feel they need to have an advocate with them because when the button is pushed calling for the nurse, sometimes they are not there, not because they don't want to be there, but because they are in the next room or the next room and not able to get to their patients.
Madam Speaker, it is important that Congress recognize and celebrate our nurses during National Nurses Week and throughout the year, and throughout the years to come. Our nurses stand up for us, and I am honored to stand up for them.
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