NYsNA Members Head to Albany to Demand Budget Justice

advocates and spiritual leaders have long said that budgets are moral documents you can tell the values and priorities of a people by how they allocate resources. With this in mind, hundreds of NYSNA nurses descended on Albany on March 22 to lobby for greater investment in healthcare to support frontline healthcare professionals, our patients, and the goal of ending racial and social disparities in healthcare.

New York’s nurses and patients just went through a winter tridemic of COVID-19, flu, and RSV, which drove high rates of hospitalization and deaths. With March marking the three-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York is also facing a migrant crisis and a mental health crisis that impact healthcare delivery throughout the state. Our public and safety-net hospitals are shouldering a disproportionate share of the difficult and underfunded care for migrants and patients with complex mental health needs, while our nurses are understaffed and under resourced.

Listen to the Nurses

Given our current crisis, NYSNA members organized a speak-out outside State Senate chambers and met with legislators to emphasize that our healthcare system needs more support from the state budget in order to ensure fair funding for safety-net and public hospitals and enough nurses to provide qual- ity care to all New Yorkers. The state budget must support health equity. More than thirty legislators stood alongside NYSNA nurses and echoed our call for budget justice, including State Senate Majority Leader Andrea StewartCousins, Sen. Robert Jackson, Sen. Jessica Ramos, and Assembly Members and registered nurses, Phara Souffrant Forrest and Karines Reyes. An advocate from Make the Road New York spoke out about extending healthcare coverage to all, including immigrant New Yorkers.

NYSNA nurses were pleased to see the State Senate and Assembly budget proposals improve upon Governor Hochul’s budget proposal to direct funding where it’s needed most and address our core issues, including: protecting nursing practice standards; fair funding for safety-net and public hospitals; regulating temporary nurse staffing agencies; and expanding access to care.

Lobbying and More

In more than a dozen meetings with legislators throughout the day, NYSNA nurses lobbied for additional funding for safe staffing both to educate, recruit and train more nurses and to ensure hospitals and nursing homes follow the law and consistently meet safe staffing standards. Clearly, there’s more work to be done to ensure the enacted budget reflects our values and truly helps deliver the healthcare that New Yorkers deserve. That’s why NYSNA members will be closely watching the budget negotiations between the governor, state senate and state assembly as we approach the April budget deadline, and we will continue to push for fair healthcare funding and policies that meet the moment we are in.