By Doug Cunningham

RoseAnn Demoro of the California Nurses Association says now that Pennsylvania's largest RN association has affiliated with CNA, the national nurses movement just got stronger.

[Demoro]: "This movement is actually taken off and growing. And nurses have joined together in 50 states. We're going to use that voice in an activist way. We have a political structure that essentially capitulates far more to the industry and the corporations than it does to the people. And we want to use the voice of nurses across this country in every community to actually be the voice for the patient. And that's what this merger represents."

Patricia Eakin is President of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals. She says we need national single payer universal health care. And states need minimum nurse-patient staffing ratio laws - like one CNA got passed in California - to ensure safe and high-quality patient care.

[Eakin]: "We need to have some way to protect patients from having to be part of a huge cohort of patients and with their nurse having too many patients that she or he can safely take care of. And the nurse needs to have a workable load so that person, that nurse , can do his or her job and not suffer burnout and leave the profession."