TRUTH BE TOLD – EDITORIAL


NURSES STATION


Nurses make Roswell Park national magnet


By SHERRY HALBROOK How do you turn a seriously negative


situation into a strong positive? Check with PEF members at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, because they have been part of making just such an impressive change there. RPCI went from having the typical


situations and issues that drag down a nursing program to becoming America’s first cancer center to have earned Magnet® Recognition for nursing excellence, a top national honor bestowed by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) September 16, 2010. RPCI joined approximately just 6


percent of all hospitals in the United States that earn Magnet® recognition. RPCI is the only hospital in Western New York and the only freestanding cancer center in New York State to earn this recognition. It’s a distinction many hospitals say


they wouldn’t even attempt to achieve with unionized staff. But the outstanding success of PEF’s and RPCI management’s joint effort has made it a model for other


hospitals throughout the country. Magnet® distinction recognizes quality


patient care, nursing excellence and innovations in professional nursing practice, providing the ultimate benchmark for patients and the public to measure the quality of care they can expect to receive. “What really helped us was setting up


a joint labor-management subcommittee on nursing issues nearly two years ago,” said Adam Sumlin, council leader of PEF Division 196 and a cancer researcher at RPCI. “We had a lot of nursing issues, such


as the need for better pay, career ladder and shifts, that came up all the time at our labor-management committee meetings. “We surveyed our members to find out


how they experienced these problems and what they needed,” Sumlin said. “Then we established the subcommittee to develop a flexible work schedule. PEF worked with management to get a


career differential that allows RPCI to pay more for work on certain shifts and


rewards nurses who earn their BS degree or higher and that gives them a greater chance of promotion.” “We went from a shortage of nurses to


a waiting list of nurses applying to work here,” Sumlin said. In its most recent patient satisfaction


survey, RPCI ranked in the 99th percentile nationwide for overall nursing care. PEF member Lisa Boris, RN, MS,


assistant director of patient care services and head of the Magnet® program at RPCI, helped prepare the hospital’s 3,500- page application for Magnet® status. She said the ultimate proof of excellence must be found in patients’ battles against cancer. “In Magnet® hospitals patients’


outcomes are better and their stays are shorter,” Boris said. “We’re proud to be included in such an


elite group,” said Donald L. Trump, MD. “Our nurses are a driving and innovative force behind the quality of care a person receives at RPCI and our shared mission to understand, prevent and cure cancer.”


The scam that goes on taking


By MARTY O’CONNOR As of this writing in mid-August, the


stock market is again in a free fall. How did we get in this mess? We’ve been told the housing bubble


that burst in 2008 caused the stock market to crash. This, in turn, caused the government to bail out some of the big investment banks so they wouldn’t fail. Now, we are raising our national debt limit and the markets are crashing again. But what created the housing bubble


in the first place? Was it too many people buying houses they couldn’t afford? Was it banks scamming everyone? Was it a lack of oversight? Yes, yes and yes. Greed created this


mess. The people who run the big finance


corporations saw a way to make billions of dollars by taking risky home mortgages and combining them with safe mortgages and selling them as if they were all safe investments. It’s like if you had a couple of boxes


worth of junk leftover after a garage sale. You go get an appraiser to say your boxes of junk are valuable. So, you sell it and make more money than you should have made. Now, you look for other peoples’ boxes of junk, get them appraised as valuable and sell them for far more than they are worth.


Page 10—The Communicator September 2011 This is what happened with mortgages.


The banks were able to get the ratings agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, to rate mortgage bonds as AAA (the best) when they were, in fact, junk bonds. (Yes, that’s the same S&P that just downgraded the U.S. credit rating.) Why did S&P and Moody’s give bogus


ratings? They depend on the banks for business. The banks made enormous amounts of


money by selling this junk as if it was gold. They had the lenders out there scaring up every mortgage they could. Some of these loans were to people


who should have known better. The homebuyers should have asked, how they could get such a big mortgage with so little income? They should have asked, how much would the payment be when the real interest rates kicked in? They didn’t. Some of them trusted the lenders to know if they could afford the house. Some of them thought they would sell their house for a profit before their mortgage payments went too high. After all, housing prices were rising. No one counted on housing prices


going down. But they did. Then, those same shrewd bankers


actually bet the securities they had just sold trusting customers as low risk, would fail.


It would be like you, in the analogy


above, selling your boxes of junk to an antique store and then buying insurance that would pay you again if the store went out of business. You can’t do that, but the banks could and they did. When millions of mortgages began to fail, the companies that insured the mortgage securities were in big trouble. So, too, were any financial houses that didn’t bet against the bad securities. AIG, which was insuring these


securities, couldn’t pay the insurance claims. It came running to the government for help and we, all of us, dumped trillions of dollars into AIG and the financial houses that created the crisis and then bet against their scam. Goldman Sachs, alone, got $63.3


billion. And the ratings houses, such as S&P and Moody’s, continue to work for the financial houses and go on as if they had no part to play in this fiasco. This is what happens when


government regulation of the financial markets looks the other way and trusts the markets to regulate themselves. Our rush to save our economy cost us dearly. Now, honest American taxpayers will be paying this dishonest debt for generations.


PEF Information Line: 1-800-553-2445


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