A Compassionate Healer and Fierce Fighter for Fellow RNs
/
Zenei Cortez (center), Deborah Burger and Jean Ross lead some 185,000 fellow RNs as co-presidents of National Nurses United with Bonnie Castillo as NNU executive director. (Photo courtesy of NNU)
Now more than ever, RNs have become a critical lifeline as they directly confront a mysterious deadly illness that has killed at least 150,00 in the United States alone and countless more around the world.
Their presence ensures professional attention at the expense of their own well-being. Remember the phalanx of RNs and other front-line workers standing their ground in a hospital when irate science disbelievers spewed expletives along with microbes in their faces, images that went viral in the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic?
Nurses are as strong and fearless as they are gentle and comforting. Their mettle is tested by their ability to follow protocol; but taken for granted they will not be.
Certainly not since 2007, when Zenei Cortez assumed leadership of the California Nurses Association (CNA), the Golden State component of National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in North America, founded in 2009.
CNA prez bats for Medicare for All. (Photo courtesy of NNU)
The Philippine-born Cortez, as co-president, and leaders of the United American Nurses and Massachusetts Nurses Association guide and protect some 185,000 fellow RNs. Cortez says she "fights to win," and she’s a proven collective bargaining team chair of two "successful" contract negotiations for 19,000 RNs at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, her employer. The pact guarantees staffing enhancements, protection of nurses' pensions and benefits, wage increases, and inclusion of patient care coordinator RNs into the contract.
Lately, she has focused on what she sees as the under-protection of nurses and other front-line professionals in the current and unabated pandemic, even as she pushes the Medicare for All Act of 2019.
The coronavirus has claimed one too many US health care professionals, including over 25 nurses of Philippine ancestry, which is unacceptable to Cortez, who challenges authorities to prevent further fatalities in the line of duty.
"I have been and still am speaking publicly about the need for optimum personal protective equipment (PPE), how the federal and state governments have put nurses’ and other front-line healthcare workers’ lives at risk," she tells Positively Filipino. "The deaths of many Fil-Am nurses are a tragedy, so are the other deaths. These deaths could have been prevented if only we were given the optimum PPE at the very beginning of this pandemic."
She holds the Centers for Disease Control accountable for not having "maintained its strict guidance on stopping the spread and the transmission of the virus, and not watered it down, more lives could have been spared."
Cortez is unafraid to nudge the powerful.
She vows to "continue to push for legislation to protect nurses and other frontline workers and for the (US) President to fully invoke the defense production act that will mandate local industries to mass produce PPE and other critical supplies that are much needed to fight Covid-19."
A 40-year health care veteran who has held the fort in the face of HIV, SARS, and MERS, Cortez fleshes out her own definition of a registered nurse: "Caring, compassionate and courageous." She can be feisty as she needs to be.
"The Registered Nurse is the heart of patient care, someone who provides the healing touch," she tells Positively Filipino.
"Nurses are seen as the handmaid of doctors and are unable to function independently," she raised a common misperception. "Not true. Of course, there are doctors' orders that need to be carried out, but we have our own professional practice. We adhere to the nurse practice act and we are guided by professional nursing standards. Nurses use their professional judgment to safely care for the patients."
That's what she wants the world to know about her professional community, not the "submissive and passive" depiction of nurses, more pointedly Fil-Am RNs, who make up a fifth of their peers in California, according to the Boston Globe health news site STAT. She has been working to correct the stereotype, which the current crisis is helping achieve, she says.
"If there is one good thing that happened in this pandemic, it has transformed a lot of Fil-Ams and other nurses to speak up. More nurses are advocating for themselves for safe working conditions and optimum PPE, so they can provide safe patient care while keeping themselves safe too."
Union members, she says, strengthen each other.
"Joining the union has done a lot of good for every nurse," Cortez explains. "We have a collective voice to speak up about our issues, raise concerns, point out violations, plus we are able to exercise our collective action if we need to. We are not fearful of retaliation or being fired when we blow the whistle, as we have protected rights under our collective bargaining agreement."
Absolutely badass, this Filipina American knew as a child exactly what profession to pursue.
She was born in Manila, raised in Makati and educated in Illinois, where her family joined the rest of the clan in 1974. She earned her Associates in Arts at Harry S. Truman Junior College in Uptown Chicago before entering the South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing.
Cortez (seated right) comes from a family of nurses. (Photo courtesy of NNU)
Tradition
Two decades earlier, Philippine nurses had begun arriving in droves in the United States as immigration law eased restrictions for medical professionals.
But Cortez's pioneer predecessors learned their craft much earlier, when the United States launched a nursing program in its new Pacific colony, UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy uncovered in her doctorate research.
"This Americanized nursing curriculum inadvertently prepared them to work in the United States. They were trained, oftentimes, in English instruction. Even their early nursing licensure examinations had an English language component,” Ceniza Choy told Anne Brice of Berkeley News.
The concept of Manifest Destiny, or the belief that it’s Americans’ God-given right to promote Christianity and western civilization, brought Americans of European descent to the opposite side of the globe, she recalled.
“It’s this kind of racial hierarchical attitude that influenced their decision that in order to uplift Filipinos, we need to educate them in American ways,” at all academic levels Choy continued, including "Americanized nursing training.”
After World War II, the US proclaimed the Philippines independent (although Philippine revolutionaries had declared independence from Spain in 1898) and began welcoming foreign professionals in an Exchange Visitor program to "help spread democracy around the world." Having had their training under the Americans, Philippine nurses began heading to the US.
A confluence of developments later opened opportunity for Filipino nurses with the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which opened the US to more foreign arrivals. At the same time, a nursing shortage prompted hospitals to advertise for Filipino nurses, Ceniza Choy says.
Familiar with this historical backdrop, Cortez adds her cultural perspective.
Where the future nurses’ union leader completed her nursing studies stokes memories of a tragedy that made headlines around the world. (Photo courtesy of NNU)
"Filipino parents believe their daughter or son can work abroad, send money back home to help the family. In a lot of cases, this is true. The nurse working abroad, is able to help send their siblings to school, build a nice home for their parents and help keep the family out of poverty," she says, shedding light on the appeal of nursing over medical studies in her birth country. "Schooling is short, obtaining a license is quicker and there is a faster chance of landing a job" than for prospective MDs.
However, the average monthly salary for entry-level RNs in the private sector in the Philippines receive "far below the living wage, ranging from $157-235 and can be assigned up to 100 patients per shift," according to Filipino Nurses United, which was formed to improve wages and working conditions. Those who can, seek employment overseas.
The Windy City, Cortez's home state, is seared in the memories of many Filipinos and other Americans.
Nurses or not, people of a certain age associate Chicago with Filipino nurses in particular because of the tragedy over 50 years ago that grabbed international headlines. Eight student nurses ages 20-24 were tortured and killed on July 13, 1966. Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion had arrived from the Philippines some two months earlier with their fellow nursing student Corazon Amurao.
Amurao was the lone survivor of the massacre. She had crawled under a bed for five hours until she was sure the assailant had left. Her testimony sent him to prison on eight counts of murder and rape of one of her roommates.
Cortez says her father's youngest sister was supposed to have been with the group but was held back for health reasons.
““The Registered Nurse is the heart of patient care, someone who provides the healing touch,” she tells Positively Filipino. ”
Born to lead
South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing, where Amurao and her colleagues studied, is also Cortez's alma mater.
Even as a student Cortez, elected class president multiple times, was already making waves as a self-identified "leader, mentor, organizer and motivator."
"All of these experiences helped me with who I am today," she says, assessing her younger self. " Over the course of my nursing career, I saw the need for nurses to step up and advocate for their patients and their profession. And so I did. The bedside advocacy was not enough and nurses need to take this up to their elected officials and to the streets."
"Zenei was born to lead," says colleague Malou Aclan, RN, a care manager at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in South San Francisco, who also began her nursing career in Chicago.
Aclan, co-founder of the Kaiser Permanente Filipino Association comprising all Fil-Am hospital staff, notes that Cortez "has the guts to say what's on most people's minds but keep to themselves to avoid controversy."
"Zenei gives them a voice," Aclan says, observing her co-worker in action.
Behind Cortez's fierce exterior is a woman devoted to her family. She married her "supportive" husband in 1986. She says he "sees my joy and fulfillment doing union work." Her genes point to a long and productive life, like her father who passed in his sleep early this year at 101 years old but was independent till the end.
PH nurses cheer their mentor (in red) at the 2nd Filipino Nurses United 2019 convention in the Philippines.
Cortez's prescription for longevity as a union leader and bedside nurse is pretty simple:
"When I am not fighting injustice, I spend time reading, meditating, or traveling. Or simply being with family, chatting, updating each other. When you are with people you love and they love you more, I find that relaxing and uplifting."
Cherie Querol Moreno
San Francisco Bay Area-based Cherie M. Querol Moreno learned empathy, courage and responsibility from her journalist parents. The executive editor of Philippine News Today and correspondent for Positively Filipino and Inquirer.net is founder-executive director of abuse-prevention nonprofit ALLICE and four-term commissioner with San Mateo County Commission on Aging.
More articles from Cherie Querol Moreno