John Welsh, a nurse at Unity Hospital, outlined the MNA’s 2024 legislative agenda.

Less than a year after hospital lobbyists stymied efforts to establish minimum staffing levels in Minnesota hospitals, union nurses will head back to the Capitol in 2024 with an agenda focused on safety, nurse retention and increased accountability for health systems and their highly paid executives.

The Minnesota Nurses Association calls it the “Healing Greed Agenda,” and the union has readied a broadly supported campaign to advance it when the 2024 legislative session begins Monday.

“Hospital executives think they run the show,” MNA President Chris Rubesch, a nurse at Essentia-Duluth, said during a Capitol press conference Feb. 5. “They have the money to pay more than sixty lobbyists to ensure the system stays exactly like it is. But we are here today to speak with one voice and demand change. Minnesota can do better, and we must do better!”

Leaders of several other labor organizations, including the Minnesota AFL-CIO and AFSCME Council 5, joined the press conference, pledging to work in coalition to support the campaign. And MNA leaders listed several DFL lawmakers who are working with the coalition to usher the proposed policy measures through the Legislature.

Those measures include:

• Increased protections for nurses who raise concerns about patient safety and inadequate staffing in their hospitals, and greater legal accountability for hospital executives when their staffing decisions lead to adverse events. MNA pointed to several examples of hospitals allegedly retaliating against nurses for calling out unsafe staffing in their units.

• An enhanced student-loan forgiveness program, with more funding and expanded eligibility, designed to recruit and retain hospital nurses, as well as new protections against violence in hospitals – another factor driving nurses away from the bedside. Nurses’ proposed violence prevention measures include trauma-informed care and de-escalation strategies.

• Increased regulation of nonprofit hospitals’ finances and operations, including a cap on executive pay and new requirements that hospitals give public notice of planned service cuts and consolidations. Nurses also want to see increased scrutiny of hospitals’ debt-collection tactics and how the non-profit institutions are meeting requirements that, in lieu of paying taxes, they invest in charity care and public health.

Nationwide polling results, released by Gallup in January, showed that nurses are the most trusted profession among Americans, with 77% of respondents agreeing that they are “honest and ethical.” It was the 22nd consecutive year in which nurses had the highest rating of any profession.

MNA President Chris Rubesch spoke during the Capitol press conference Feb. 5.

At the press conference. Sandra Feist (D-New Brighton) said lawmakers should have the same trust in nurses’ assessment of how corporate greed is impacting patient care in Minnesota hospitals.

“As lawmakers, we need to trust nurses when they tell us that they face retaliation for speaking up in defense of safe patient care,” Feist said. “We need to trust nurses when they tell us that violence is rising in their hospitals for patients and workers due to slashed staff levels and resources. And we need to trust nurses when they tell us that there is a crisis in our hospitals.”

But the “Healing Greed Agenda” is also notable for what isn’t included: the hospital staffing mandates that nurses hoped would become law a year ago.

The “Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act” advanced through several legislative committees in 2023. The measure would have required hospitals to create labor-management committees to determine appropriate staffing in their wards, but support among lawmakers dwindled after Mayo Clinic threatened to withhold investments in its Rochester campus if the measure passed.

“Hospital CEOs have created a crisis in our hospitals that is driving nurses from the bedside and putting safe patient care at risk,” Shiori Konda-Muhammad, a vice president of MNA, said. “Now, they’re doing everything in their power to keep nurses from speaking up and taking action to demand better for patients and workers.”

Feist and many other DFL lawmakers continue to support the “Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act,” but she said advocates decided to prioritize the anti-retaliation measure during this shortened legislative session because “it is pure policy,” while the staffing law would be more appropriately considered during a budget session.

Konda-Muhammad, meanwhile, said MNA members will continue to advocate for minimum staffing requirements in their bargaining units – and they shouldn’t fear retaliation from management when they do it.

“We nurses will continue to fight for patients,” she said. “Now, we need lawmakers to have our backs and stand up to corporate bullies in our health care system so we can carry on that fight.”