BCNU's reasons for offering associate memberships

Offering associate memberships will help build more collaborative practice relationships with other healthcare professionals, putting patient care at the centre of everything we do.

It also will help expand our influence with health policy decision makers. It's a simple equation: the more we broaden our base by encouraging others to affiliate with us and work with us, the more influence BCNU will gain in managing changes in healthcare.

BCNU Associate Membership is about finding a new balance between being a traditional trade union and becoming the professional voice for all nurses and all healthcare employees.

Employees at non-unionized facilities can become BCNU associates to explore our services and learn how we can improve their wages, benefits and working conditions through collective bargaining.

Important changes are occurring in healthcare that could impact our ability to advance member interests and improve public healthcare.  Responding creatively is critical to meet emerging challenges such as:  

• employer-promoted skill mix changes that bring nurses into workplaces who are not BCNU members. We need to work with them to ensure change is driven by the needs of patients and sound professional nursing practice, not by budgets or measures that hurt members.
  
  
• the shift by the College of Registered Nurses of BC (formerly RNABC) away from nursing advocacy to become simply a regulatory body.
  
  
• the anticipated retirement of many BCNU members while fewer nurses are recruited to take their place. Retirements in many areas of healthcare will cause changes in care delivery. We believe changes should be made in collaborative ways that focus on patients' needs.
  
  Associate memberships will bring healthcare employees into a larger association with greater influence. Then future care delivery models can be designed around quality care and collaborative relationships rather than cost cutting by employers.
  
  
• new healthcare delivery models involving primary health care, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other new job categories, as well as emerging private surgery centres, urgent care and long term care.

As healthcare continues to restructure, BCNU must evolve to remain successful as the voice of nurses and healthcare professionals in a changing environment.

Associate Membership will bring nurses and other healthcare professionals into collaborative relationships. Change can then be driven by patient needs and sound healthcare practice.

• with current BCNU members, all nurses and healthcare professionals
  
  
• employees who are not presently members of a union
  
  
• with governments, health authorities, the public and patients
  
  
• during collective bargaining
  
  
• during healthcare policy decisions
  

1. We are advancing nursing as an excellent profession by building the BC Student Nursing Association. BCNU is promoting healthcare and nursing as careers of choice. We are developing special relationships with nursing instructors and healthcare students.
   
   
2. BCNU does research with governments and employers, holds conferences, researches healthcare practice and plans to co-ordinate some of the professional practice groups formerly sponsored by RNABC.
   
   
3. BCNU assists Internationally Educated Nurses and provides members with legal protection and programs for licensing. We are developing new educational programs for emerging healthcare issues.
   
   
4. We have a strategy to improve public long term care. BCNU is developing a new community health strategy and advocating for a proper skill mix based on patients needs.
   
   
5. We are working to bring healthcare employees at non-union worksites into BCNU.

When healthcare employees become BCNU associates their current union may oppose that affiliation because it may pressure them to provide better service. Some may say BCNU is ‘raiding' their members. A number of labour organizations oppose members having a choice of unions. At BCNU we believe employees should have the final say in which union they join.

Our goal is to build collaborative practices and improve public healthcare. We have been effective at doing so. If members of other unions want to join BCNU and benefit from our history of success that should be their choice.

For years large numbers of LPNs have wanted to join BCNU and Associate Membership may be a stepping stone to full BCNU membership. However, a decision to offer full membership to LPNs has not been made by BCNU Council.

We do believe all nurses should have the right to choose their union. We also believe nurses would all be better served by belonging to one nursing union, just as they are in Manitoba and Nova Scotia and as they are currently trying to bring about in Alberta. Having LPNs, RNs, RPNs and nurse practitioners in different unions is bad for healthcare.

By being associate members now, LPNs will have the opportunity to experience BCNU and see if it's the "right fit" to become full members with other nurses. BCNU is not assuming groups of employees are ready to join our organization. But if members of other unions want to join BCNU, it should be their decision to do so by a democratic vote of the interested group.