"Why Should I Belong?"
(reprinted from February, 1956, Hulda O. Wegener, RN, Editor)
Whenever professional nurses are invited to join the Kansas State Nurses Association, members and officers of the Association are bound to hear the same questions leveled at them time and again. Here are some of those questions, and they are undoubtedly familiar to you. Perhaps you have asked a few of them yourself.
“What has the Kansas State Nurses Association to offer me?"
Why should I join the Association when it doesn't force hospitals and other employers of nurses to make clear the distinction between the professional nurse, the practical nurse, and the aide?"
What good will result to me personally through membership in the Association?"
How can the Association raise my pay and get me better hours and better working conditions?"
Why should I be a member of the Kansas State Nurses Association?"
These are just a few of the most typical of these questions. As you know, there are many others, all in the same vein, and most directed by nurses who are honestly concerned about their own professional standing and the progress of the profession in the state and in the nation.
The answers to these questions have been various - many of them emotional, many of them illogical, and many of them sensible and straightforward. But nearly all of these answers are tactful, in fact, that they skirt the truth of the matter. The purpose of this statement is to come as close to the truth as possible, and to avoid nothing. So, if we are going to come to grips with the facts of the case, let us answer the first typical question first:
What has the Kansas State Nurses Association to offer me?" The answer to that question is so blunt as to startle many unthinking nurses, because the Association has already made possible your career as a professional nurse. That's a fact. Even if you never join the Kansas State Nurses Association and never do a single thing to further its aims and goals, you are a registered nurse in Kansas because of the work of the Kansas State Nurses Association - and no other group or organization.
True, the law was passed by the Kansas legislature, but the legislature drew heavily upon the resources of KSNA and the American Nurses Association in the passage of this particular legislation. In fact, the Kansas law is termed a "model" nurse act by leaders of the nursing profession all over the world. All the experience of KSNA and ANA went into the Kansas act. These organizations were responsible for getting the law passed in the first place, and without this law you wouldn't even have a profession!
We are referring now to the nursing act on the books, but the original law making nursing a profession in Kansas was just as surely the work of the pioneers of nursing and nursing organizations in this state. Professional matters on a state and national level can only be handled by an organization and these early, great leaders of nursing in Kansas worked together to establish a profession and to establish an organization to see to the best interests of that profession . In fact, the organization had to come early, because government leaders cannot deal with individuals in matters of this importance. They must deal with the spokesmen of professional and vocational groups, and these spokesmen must be elected by the rank and file of the organization just as they are today in KSNA.
Some of the most important names that any Kansas nurse hears today are those of former KSNA officials who had a great deal do with the passage of professional legislation. Women like Mrs. Alma O'Keefe, first KSNA president, Sarah Patterson, Cora Miller, Mrs. Dorothy Jackson, Mrs. Mary Bure, Julia Thompson, Ethel Hastings, Sarah Zeller, and Irma Law, to mention only a few, devoted heroic efforts and great energy toward getting suitable nursing laws on the books - laws that safeguard the profession and the interest of the patient alike. These nurses and many more just like them have watched over the profession in the past without asking questions like "What can KSNA do for me?" They were concerned with the basic problem of establishing and maintaining a profession that would be a credit to themselves, to their sister nurses, and to the entire state.
That is the first and most basic contribution that the Kansas State Nurses Association has made to your career as a professional nurse. There are many others. For example, the very curriculum of the school of nursing from which you were graduated was geared to standards set up by ANA and KSNA. And in this regard, all nurses should clearly understand that the ten Kansas districts are all integral parts of KSNA, just as KSNA is an integral part of ANA. The tremendous improvements (many of them in recent years) in the practices, curricula, and standards of schools of nursing have been made by the nursing profession through its professional organizations. And there are legal safeguards, including supervision by the state board, established by the nursing laws, to see that standards of the schools are not relaxed.
These are just a few of the legal provisions made for your professional career in Kansas, and it is the legal side of the matter that makes your calling a profession. The difference between a profession and any other vocation is that a profession has its qualifications, functions, and responsibilities defined legally and its individual practitioners registered legally, just as you are registered every year.
In addition, the KSNA is the watchdog of your legal rights and benefits. It keeps a close surveillance of all bills proposed in the Kansas legislature touching the nursing profession in particular and the working professional woman in general. It acts as the spokesman of the profession in all legislative and legal matters and as the resource group for all questions and other types of needed information.
That brings us to the second typical question:
"Why should I join the Association when it doesn't force hospitals
and other employers of nurses to make clear the distinction between the
professional nurse, the practical nurse, and the aide?" The legal
aspects of nursing are some of the most important functions of your Association.
The policing of the profession to see that the functions and rights of
the professional nurse are not infringed by other less qualified persons
and groups is one of the phases of the Association's activities. In this
regard, however, the Association must depend largely upon the work of
its individual members and its district organizations.
For example, if an unauthorized school of practical nursing is begun anywhere in the state, it is the duty of KSNA members to report the matter to their district as soon as possible. The district then reports to state headquarters, and the matter is taken up with the correct state officials to require compliance with state nursing laws. The same can be said about unqualified persons performing acts reserved legally to the professional nurse. In each case, it is the duty of the professional nurse, who is a member of her professional organization, to report the irregular activity and to see that action is taken. The files of the Kansas State Nurses Association bulges with incidents of this nature that have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Yet the Association is seriously hampered by the fact that only about half the professional nurses in Kansas have thought enough of their profession to join their Association and make themselves militant, participating members of the profession, alive to all its challenges and to all its responsibilities. If every eligible nurse in Kansas were a member of the Kansas State Nurses Association and exercised her responsibilities, unprofessional acts by unqualified personnel would cease to be a problem. That is not an idle forecast; it is a fact proved by other professions better unified than nursing.
The third typical question,
"What good will result to me personally through membership in the
Association," is one that is most often given unsatisfactory answers
by Association officers and members because it is a question impossible
to answer without knowing how much the individual nurse is willing to
give of herself. There is an old saying that the world returns to us exactly
as much as we give it, and if you don't believe that you will always be
one of those unfortunates that fate is always picking on. But if you accept
the belief that your bread will return to you after casting it on the
waters, you have a rich experience awaiting you as a member of the Kansas
State Nurses Association.
In the first place, no important nursing leader in Kansas believes that she can be effective a leader in the profession outside the Association. For that reason the best Kansas nurses are members of the Association. They are alert to changes to their profession, informed on the progress of nursing trends, and they have an intangible attitude that is difficult to describe but is as apparent to an observer as a new hat. These nurses know what's going on in their profession, and they take advantage of it.
The Kansas State Nurses Association is not a "retreat": nor is it a mother hen that broods her chicks protectingly. The Kansas State Nurses Association is an organization of professional nurses, who have banded themselves together to look after their own interests and the interests of the patients committed to their care. This year's theme, "What I Am - Nursing Is," is characteristic of the Kansas State Nurses Association attitude toward itself. The Association is no better and no worse than its individual members, and it can do nothing that its individual members, acting in concert and unity, cannot achieve. On the other hand, there is no professional goal that cannot be reached if all eligible nurses in the state were members of their Association and were willing to work hard to accomplish their individual and organization aims.
To many nurses the important functions of the Kansas State Nurses Association are in the field of economic security. This is the type nurse who asks, "How can the Association raise my pay and get me better hours and working conditions." Unfortunately, this is the nurse who often stands most directly in the way of a solution to an economic security problem in her hospital or agency because she is the "maverick" or the "lone wolf" who does not belong to the Association and is not willing to unify with the other nurses in her institution and form a local professional committee to discuss economic problems with her employer.
The answer to the economic security problems of nurse lies in the local professional committee composed of all nurses in a particular hospital or institution, the procedure is deceptively simple. All the nurses need to do is to unify themselves, decide unanimously on what they want, elect a committee of spokesmen, and empower that committee to deal with their employers. In Kansas the exclusive right to negotiate with employers of nurses on matters dealing with wages, hours and conditions of employment rests with the Kansas State Nurses Association. If every nurse in a hospital, for example, will join the Association, participate actively in the organization of a local professional committee, then back up that committees' negotiations with the employer, solution of any economic security problem would be only a matter of time.
The real stumbling block is the lack of unity. There are many instances of the successful working of local professional committees in Kansas, so experience proves that it is the practical way to attack economic security problems, but there are many, many other instances of failure of negotiations owing to a lack of unity among the nurses themselves. In this respect, it should be mentioned here that compromise is an essential ingredient of unanimous action. The Constitution of the United States is a compromise document, an example of how well a thing may be done with compromise. So, do not expect that every nurse's ideas will be accepted in toto when you have your first professional meeting in your institution. There must be compromise among the nurses themselves, and there must be compromise with the hospital administrator or other employer[s] when you come to negotiations with him.
Behind all these local units and committees is the full power of the Kansas State Nurses Association and its exclusive right to bargain. If a local unit gets "stuck", they may call on state headquarters for assistance. If fact, most local units are in constant touch with headquarters in matters relating to procedure, etc. To the local unit is reserved the main task of organization and negotiation, but none of this would be possible without the backing and assistance of your professional Association.
"Why should I be a member of the Kansas State Nurses Association?" Perhaps that should have been question No. 1, because by this time any clear-seeing nurse must realize that she is not truly professional unless she is a member of her professional organization and sharing in the problems of the profession as a whole, not merely bearing her individual burdens. If she is not a member of the Association, she has delegated to more energetic, more responsible, and more dedicated nurses the affairs of her profession. She has no voice in the matter at all. Everything that is done is either done for her or in spite of her. Most assuredly, she has had no hand in securing for nurses everything they have gained over the years. Sometimes, all she does is complain about things that have not yet been accomplished. Yet, she is still unwilling to do any thing about it herself. This nurse is still sharing the misconception that the Association is something other than a group of nurses working in their colleagues best interests.
Although the antagonistic "show me what you can do for me" type of nurse is the kind that asks most of the typical questions that we have discussed in these pages, there is another nurse who does not belong to the Association. She is the nurse who, through growth of a family or other personal problems, has come to the conclusion that her profession is one of the least of her worries. She works for whatever she can get, doing whatever is demanded of her, and gets through it as quickly as possible in order to get home and take care of the more important and pressing problems there.
This nurse is a serious problem to the profession because she is not very valuable to anybody, least of all to the employer, who has to suffer her careless practices and mistakes and to the patient who must endure such slipshod nursing.
A nurse of this type has more to gain from membership in the Kansas State Nurses Association than any other - if she intends to continue working. She needs a recharging of the spiritual batteries that brought her to the profession in the first instance. She needs to have a reawakening of the challenge to do her best and to improve her best day by day. She would gain from it, her employer would gain, the patients would gain, and her family would also gain. No one is happy doing a slovenly job, although occasionally disinterest leads us to slough our breadwinning tasks in favor of other more attractive duties and pastimes. Bringing a straying lamb back to the fold of professional dedication is one of the highest tasks the Kansas State Nurses Association undertakes.
We come at last to the ugly word "dues". There is no gainsaying the fact that it takes money to run an Association, but the amount is not great in any of the ten districts in Kansas. Generally you may become a member of KSNA for about $20 a year[!]. That is less than 40 cents a week - just a little more than the cost of a malted milk. None of us likes to let go of $20, but none of us - we are professional nurses - can afford to put our professional affairs into the hands of others for non-payment of such a trifling amount each year.
If you are a professional nurse in Kansas, there is only one course open to you in this matter. To be wholly professional you must join your professional organization. You are enjoying the advantages and benefits accomplished for you by others who dedicated themselves to your welfare in the past, now assume your share of the responsibilities of your profession as a member of the Kansas State Nurses Association.