Riverside Community Hospital nurse Kathy Montanino is passionate and outspoken about bedside nurses’ power to achieve meaningful political change for patients. 

And what she wants all nurses to know about elected officials is that “they are people just like us. Just like our patients in the bed. Just like the family member that’s concerned about their loved one in the bed. They have relatives or loved ones that have also been in the hospital.”

“And who wouldn’t want to protect nurses that protect patients?”

In this video, Kathy explains why lobbying lawmakers is such a vital part of advocating for patients and ensuring our patients receive the highest possible level of care. 

Nurses speaking up and sharing their experiences at the bedside, Montanio says, is made all the more important by the fact that “hospitals have a ‘union’ that lobbies for their interests. And, as we all know, their interest is profits over patients.”

Most importantly, Montanino says, nurses can connect policymakers to the human impact of healthcare policy. Because of her bedside experience, Montanino was able to share with legislators the story of a patient with fatal injuries, and the heartbreak of not being able to be there for the family as much as she would have liked to, because she was assigned to too many patients at once:

“I had to choose between giving care to one ICU patient… or giving care to this girl that was losing brain function and brain cells for every minute I couldn’t be there with her or talk to the family or give them that comfort …and walk them through the process of losing her.”

Through stories like these, healthcare professionals are uniquely positioned to report from the frontlines, where healthcare policy and patient care meet.

Ultimately, Montanino says, “each and every one of my stories, which is each and every one of your stories, makes a difference. These stories, whether good, whether bad, impact how laws happen…As a nurse, we’re taught how to think ahead and be able to see what can happen bad and try to head that off. Well, it’s the same thing we can do with  politicians that pass laws. We can say, ‘hey, this needs to change,’ or, ‘this needs to be enacted so that we can keep our patients safe’.

“Because safety is our number one thing. We advocate that, we’re taught that, we eat and breathe that, and we can accomplish that through lobbying.”