About NNOC-Texas
NNOC-Texas is the state chapter of the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC), one of the nation’s premiere nurses’ organizations and healthcare unions. NNOC currently represents 85,000 registered nurses in 50 states.
NNOC-Texas recently won a contract to represent the first private Texas hospital to be unionized, at Cypress-Fairbanks Medical Center in Houston. Those nurses are among nearly 10,000 activist RNs in the state who have organized and advocated for patient care and safety reforms. Hundreds of RNs have marched on the state Capitol in Austin several times now, most recently in November 2008.
NNOC is the voice of the national nurses movement, and has won national and international acclaim for helping secure a groundbreaking California law to guarantee minimum, safe RN-to-patient ratios on all units at all times. This means no patient will ever have to face a situation where a nurse is unavailable due to an unsafe patient load.
Since the nation’s first safe RN ratios law was implemented in that state in 2004, nurses have called it “a vital instrument for stemming the erosion of care standards in our hospitals,” and a necessary step to deal with a wide array of patient safety problems that arise as a result of an unsafe ratio of nurses to patients, from infections to strokes. The law has helped increase the number of RNs working in California by more than 100,000, easing the state’s shortage of RNs.
The campaign for safe patient ratios has become a national one in recent years, with NNOC groups in Texas, Illinois, Arizona, and Nevada filing their own bills, and with a federal bill being prepared for introduction.
In addition, NNOC is a leading national advocate for guaranteed healthcare reform, through a single-payer style system based on an improved and expanded Medicare for all. NNOC is sponsoring HR 676 by U.S. Rep John Conyers in Congress, and state bills around the country to this end.
NNOC was founded in 2004 by the California Nurses Association, and also includes the Maine State Nurses Association and Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals. NNOC is affiliated with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations.
