Pictured (from left to right): Annette Pepper, Deputy Director ANA-MI; Linda Taft, Past President ANA-MI; Julia Stocker-Schneider, President-elect ANA-MI; Carole Stacy, President ANA-MI; Stacy Slater, Treasurer and Membership Assembly Representative, ANA-MI and Tobi Lyon-Moore, Executive Director ANA-MI at the annual American Nurses Association – Michigan Membership Assembly in Washington D.C.
On Tuesday, June 20, 2019, Baker College Assistant Professor of Nursing Stacy Slater represented the American Nurses Association – Michigan (ANA-MI) at the annual Membership Assembly in Washington D.C.
As the current Treasurer and Membership Assembly Representative for ANA-MI, Stacy joined the ANA-MI President Carole Stacy, President-elect Julia Stocker-Schneider, and past President Linda Taft and National Director-at-Large MaryLee Pakiser for three days of networking, meeting with elected Congressman and voting on policy proposals and bylaws.
Stacy was part of a task force for ANA-MI that created and submitted a policy proposal for dialogue. Out of 65 submissions our policy proposal – “Visibility of Nurses in the Media” – was chosen as one of four to be discussed and voted on. In 1997 the Woodhull Study found that nurses are consulted only 4% of the time as expert sources in healthcare despite being voted the most trusted profession for 17 years in a row.
In 2017, 20 years later, the Woodhull Study was revisited and found that nurse consults for health news stories dropped to 2%. The dialogue was well-received by the assembly and Stacy’s tag-line of “4 Million Nurses, 4 Million Voices – Invisible No More” was adopted as the rallying motivation to improve nurse visibility in the media as the go-to source for health news by educating the media, positioning nurses as influencers, and employing a transformational strategy by developing an interprofessional training program with nursing and journalism students.
On Thursday, June 20, 2019, the group had a jam-packed day of meeting with Michigan Senators and Representatives. ANA-MI asked for support and co-sponsoring of four proposals: Safe Staffing Levels for Nurses and Patients; Home Health Care Planning Improvement Act of 2019; The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Services Workers Act; and Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act. I
The ANA-MI representatives met with five members of Congress: Senator Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, and Representatives Jack Bergman, John Moolenaar, and Tim Walberg.