Rep. Courtney Honors Fallen Eastern Connecticut Nurse Joyce Grayson on House Floor
Courtney calls for passage of his legislation to protect health care workers
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Rep. Joe Courtney (CT-02) spoke on the house floor to honor Joyce Grayson—a visiting nurse who was murdered on the job in October in Willimantic, CT—and called for Congress to swiftly pass his bill to protect health care workers from violence.
“[Joyce Grayson] was an angel… and her family has asked for one thing. They want to see change,” Courtney said on the House floor.
“All of us rely on the health care workforce. Republican or Democrat, all of us need them to care for us. It is time to care for them,” Courtney continued. “Let’s pass H.R. 2663 in this Congress and do something meaningful for the American people.”
Rep. Courtney’s Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act compels the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to do what employees, safety experts, and Members of Congress have been calling for for years – develop an enforceable standard to ensure that employers are creating safe workplaces that their employees deserve, sooner rather than later.
For the past decade, Rep. Courtney has led the charge in Congress to mitigate violence against health care and social service workers.
In 2013, Rep. Courtney requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) study trends of workplace violence in the health care sector and identify options for OSHA to curtail it. In 2016, in response to the GAO report, Rep. Courtney and other members asked OSHA to develop a workplace safety standard to protect health care workers from this rising violence. Since then, Rep. Courtney has successfully led House passage of the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act alongside a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the 116th and 117th Congresses. In the 117th Congress, the bill passed with 254 votes, including 37 Republicans.
The bill has received support from 76 health care and social service professionals, as well as unions representing workers in these sectors, including:
American Nurses Association; American College of Emergency Physicians; Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses; American Psychiatric Association; National Nurses United; AFGE; AFL-CIO; AFSCME; AFT; American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work; American Association of Critical Care Nurses;
American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine; American Industrial Hygiene Association; American Nephrology Nurses Association;; American Public Health Association; American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; Coalition of Labor Union Women; Emergency Nurses Association; IAM; International Brotherhood of Teamsters; IMPACT in Healthcare; National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians; National Association of Social Workers; PhilaPOSH; USW; and more.
To read a fact sheet and section-by-section of the bill, click here.