I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to all our nurses who work tirelessly each and every day to achieve the best quality of life for the patients in their care. In today’s health care settings, the willingness of nurses to speak up for their patients is the essential factor in safeguarding quality care.

Our nurses can advocate for patients and a work environment that ensures optimal patient outcomes because they belong to a strong union. The employer’s view of patient care is to do the work quickly and be done with it, but that approach is neither efficient nor effective. It is the nurse who customizes the care plan to fit the needs of the individual patient and ensures that the patient understands the treatment and the care goals and has the support they need to do necessary tasks.

We celebrate our contractual victories to demonstrate the direct correlation between union voice and quality care.

The Federation of Nurses/UFT has been the strength, the voice and the tool that has allowed nurses to be heard. To address hospital short-staffing, we established and bargained for the appropriate nurse-to-patient ratio in every unit so nurses can deliver quality patient care. When a hospital violates these ratios, we tell the employer, and if the employer does not rectify the situation by providing additional staff, we file short-staffing grievances.

We have emphasized the importance of safe staffing ratios and succeeded in pushing state lawmakers to pass legislation that gives the state Department of Health the power to enforce these ratios. Our nurses in the NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn Chapter used the grievance process to expose staffing shortages as soon as they occurred. When the employer failed to remedy the situation, we went to arbitration. The arbitrators sided with us and ordered the hospital to pay extra to nurses who work on short-staffed shifts. As part of our most recent contract with NYU Langone, hospital management agreed to pay $1 million to compensate about 700 nurses who had filed short-staffing grievances. That contract also created a new arbitration process to facilitate quicker economic remedies when nursing shifts are short-staffed.

Management at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn needs to be held accountable. We have begun to use the new process to identify short-staffing on particular units and compel the employer to either provide more nurses or pay additional compensation to the nurses on short-staffed shifts.

Our union has shown it has the skill to enforce contracts, document issues with concrete data and problem-solve issues that directly affect the quality of care. We need to show the public and the community how proud we are of our work as nurses and how our short-staffing complaints have helped patients get the high-quality care they deserve.

The strength of the union matters and the voice of the union matters as we stand up to the efforts by hospitals to get patients in and out as quickly as possible, no matter what.