Amid a global pandemic that has sown chaos and misinformation in health care and claimed more than 100,000 American lives, nurses’ expertise is more relevant than ever. They’ve seen the failures of healthcare policy and delayed action on the ground. They are on the frontlines of the crisis, clamoring for adequate PPE, deciding who gets put on a ventilator, FaceTiming dying patients’ family members when visitors aren’t allowed. And across the country, nurses are hoping to bring those unique experiences to elected office. “Our leadership has to extend beyond traditional clinical roles,” says Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-IL, a registered nurse who was elected to Congress in 2018. “Even nurses who would never consider themselves political are now understanding really directly how policy decisions impact their practice and their patients' experience.”
Nurses are uniquely suited to tackle healthcare policy—something voters say is their top concern in poll after poll. “There’s a difference between knowing that healthcare coverage can be challenging, and knowing that even when people do have health insurance, they may not have access to healthcare,” says Jennifer Holm, a neonatal ICU nurse and board member of the California Nurses Association who also sits on her local school board. “When you’ve actually talked to a patient who’s said, ‘The co-pays for the doctors visits were really high, so I didn’t have that vague symptom checked out.’ And it turns out that if they had gone when they first had symptoms, they could have gotten that cancer diagnosis when it would have made a difference for their life. Seeing somebody break down in tears about that—it’s a visceral experience.”
