Massachusetts Nurses Association Endorses Maura Healey for Governor

“Maura Healey is a real champion for employees and employees’ households,” mentioned Katie Murphy, ICU RN, and president of the MNA. “The MNA is proud to endorse Maura Healey for Governor as a result of she has all the time had an open door for frontline healthcare employees. She actively listens to our issues, empathizes with the challenges we face, and works exhausting to assist nurses and healthcare professionals present high quality take care of our sufferers.”

“I’m the proud daughter and granddaughter of nurses and their empathy and resilience stick with me to at the present time,” mentioned Healey. “Nurses present us the that means of exhausting work and compassion day by day. It’s a particular honor to have MNA’s endorsement. And I can be a Governor dedicated to respecting and honoring the large worth, capability and dignity of the work they do.”

Healey, the daughter of a union nurse, has lengthy been a supporter of MNA nurses and healthcare professionals. She was the keynote speaker on the MNA Labor Chief Summit in 2016, was an early and stalwart ally of St. Vincent Hospital nurses throughout their historic 2021 strike, and as Lawyer Basic has labored carefully with the MNA and its members by means of the Coverage & Authorities Relations Division, the Well being Care and Honest Competitors Bureau, and the Honest Labor Division on quite a lot of points.

Healey additionally strongly helps employees’ collective bargaining rights. When the U.S. Supreme Courtroom opened the door to “proper to work” standing for public workers, Healey ensured employees had been totally protected beneath Massachusetts regulation, declaring in July 2018, “My workplace will all the time act to guard working households, guarantee secure working circumstances, and defend the proper of employees to prepare.” Healey has additionally fought for better transparency in conditions the place employers rent third-party anti-union contractors.

As famous in her assertion to the MNA about her candidacy for Governor, Healey has a robust report of opposition to hospital consolidation when it could improve prices or compromise high quality. She just lately launched a report on how the proposed Mass Basic Brigham growth would drive up prices – an growth that the MNA additionally opposed as a part of a coalition to guard neighborhood care. As well as, Healey opposed the proposed merger between then Companions Healthcare and South Shore Hospital in 2015.

“As Lawyer Basic, Maura Healey has not been afraid to tackle robust points and hard opponents, very similar to MNA nurses and healthcare professionals,” Murphy mentioned. “Healey stands up for what is true and can convey that very same tenacity on behalf of working individuals to the Workplace of Governor.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Massachusetts, Healey was fast to behave, serving to coordinate sources for frontline healthcare employees and first responders together with private protecting tools steerage, precedence testing, different housing choices, free and discounted meals, self-care and emergency childcare.

Healey has additionally been a strong advocate for equality, earlier than and through her time as Lawyer Basic. She introduced the primary profitable problem to the anti-LGBTQ+ Protection of Marriage Act, and has labored to struggle bullying in faculties, shield girls’s rights to accessible, reproductive healthcare, and fight discrimination in lending and housing. Healey has advocated for laws to guard transgender individuals from discrimination in public locations, a marketing campaign that MNA nurses and healthcare professionals joined as nicely.

Since its founding in 1903, the MNA has been essentially the most highly effective and efficient voice on nursing and healthcare within the Commonwealth. The MNA created the Nurse Follow Act, the RN license designation, developed a uniform curriculum for the schooling of nurses, wrote the primary code of ethics for nurses and handed, or helped to cross, almost each state regulation governing nursing apply together with the regulation permitting nurses to unionize in Massachusetts.

Right now, the MNA represents greater than 24,000 nurses and healthcare professionals working in 85 well being care services, together with 51 acute care hospitals, in addition to a rising variety of nurses and well being professionals working in faculties, visiting nurse associations, public well being departments and state businesses.

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Based in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Affiliation is the most important union of registered nurses within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing career by fostering excessive requirements of nursing apply, selling the financial and basic welfare of nurses within the office, projecting a optimistic and real looking view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory businesses on well being care points affecting nurses and the general public.

SOURCE Massachusetts Nurses Affiliation