To advocate for patients’ ability to access affordable, equitable care, including systemic education and direct action against disparities and barriers to care;
Additionally to advocate for safe staffing, safe workplaces, and healthcare workers’ rights, wellbeing, and ability to provide high quality care.
We commit to address our large, underlying drivers of inequity and inefficiency, and to empower you to directly advocate for yourself, your patients, and your situation.
To create a work environment where HCW of all professions are empowered to provide appropriate care. This means safe staffing ratios, safe work hour restrictions, adequate time off to care for oneself, fair pay, access to child care, parental leave, low cost and high quality preventative care, mental health care, women’s health, vision and dental care, student loan forgiveness options, and protection from workplace violence. These things are the minimum necessary to create a workforce that is mentally and physically able to give their best for their patients. We cannot provide safe care when we are not well ourselves.
To create a system where patients can equitably access care that maximizes quality of life. This includes low cost and high quality preventative care, mental health care, women's health, vision and dental care for all, without the threat of bankruptcy. We recognize that there are enormous identity-based disparities within our current system, and we recognize that to provide equitable and quality care for all, we must recognize, educate, and directly confront healthcare disparities experienced by race, gender, sexuality, body size, immigration status, geography, education, language, and beyond. We propose a system which provides easy access to social support structures such as safe housing and access to substance use disorder treatment.
To reduce the redundancy, bureaucracy, and red tape in our current system. As things stand, healthcare is inefficient, inequitable, and unsustainable. Patients cannot afford insurance; those that can afford insurance are faced with high premiums, copays, coinsurance, deductibles, out-of-network balance billing. Care is delayed and denied by prior authorizations and insurance company interference. Patients face enormous prescription drug costs. Monopolized hospital systems offer a lack of choice, cost transparency, and pricing regulation for patients.
At the same time, there is a massive imbalance and ambiguity of care and profit distribution between hospital administration and workers. We call for a system that empowers healthcare workers to shape the systems in which patients receive care and workers are protected.
To unite patients and healthcare workers of all levels, specialties, departments, ages, genders, nationalities, passions, politics, and creeds. Healthcare workers have historically advocated only for their individual field. The “us versus them” attitude amongst healthcare workers, and between healthcare workers and patients, doesn't recognize our common enemy in a for-profit system. We recognize that to radically transform healthcare, we must work together to recognize the needs of all, to build a sustainable system that truly works for everyone.
We influence health policy to ensure the concerns of workers and patients are prioritized.
We unite workers with diverse backgrounds to create an environment in which we are all safe, valued, and respected to collaboratively solve worker and patient barriers to care.
We catalogue worker and patient experiences with the healthcare system, and work to alleviate their burdens with kindness, sensitivity, and respect
We bring together healthcare workers to transform healthcare into a system that prioritizes patients and workers