In his recent guest opinion column, “Contact of political campaigning should come to a halt during pandemic,” Dr. Christopher Salvino points out the dangers of signature gathering during this time of spreading infection. What Dr. Salvino did not point out is that one statewide ballot measure campaign – The Stop Surprise Billing and Protect Patients Act – had stopped gathering signatures days before his column was published, and days before the state felt it safe enough to go forward with in-person voting for the presidential primary.

We agree with him that our campaign should not send “armies of signature collectors out, with clipboard and pens in hand,” so we stopped over a week ago. We also stopped door-to-door canvassing, rallies and public events. As health care professionals and members of Healthcare Rising Arizona – along with patients and consumers – we believe passionately in protecting public health. We are the nurses, medical technicians, phlebotomists, social workers, food preparers, housekeeping staff and others who keep our hospitals up and running, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are also the people who are most likely to be exposed to the coronavirus. That is why we not only stopped collecting signatures to safeguard the public outside of our hospitals, we made a public call to tighten the safety restrictions in our hospitals to protect patients and hospital staff.

We asked hospitals and county health officials to immediately put in place three specific measures:

Tighten access to hospitals by designating a limited number of specific entryways so people who have the coronavirus or are contagious are not entering hospitals unknown to hospital staff and moving around without being screened.

Screen everyone who comes to the hospital for Covid-19, either immediately when they enter the hospital or outside.

Provide masks and isolate if possible anyone exhibiting symptoms of the virus.

We also developed a detailed checklist to guide hospital policies, which covers education and training, protocols, space and equipment, staffing and communications. This is critically important because health care professionals like our members, and like Dr. Salvino, cannot provide the treatment that people need if large numbers of us get sick or are quarantined and are simply not physically available to provide critically needed hospital care.

Even before the pandemic hit, hospitals had serious work to do in stopping hospital-acquired infections. Hospitals are supposed to treat and cure patients, not make them sicker. And yet, these infections kill 99,000 people a year in our country at a cost of $20 billion. Arizona hospitals scored worse than the national benchmark for incidences of the life-threatening bacterial infection known as C. diff. Our ballot initiative will reduce deaths and lower costs, allowing hospitals to focus on improving patient care.

While we have paused our signature-gathering campaign, we still believe that we can improve public health in Arizona by passing our measure. The Stop Surprise Billing and Protect Patients Act would crack down on hospital infections, ban surprise bills from “out-of-network” providers, protect coverage for people with so-called “pre-existing conditions,” and give a much-deserved pay raise to everyday heroes who work in our hospitals, exposing themselves to viruses and infections on a daily basis. If there were ever a time to recognize our essential need to have clean, safe medical facilities, this is it. If you’d like to support our effort to safeguard public health, please reach out to Healthcare Rising Arizona at https://www.healthcarerisingaz.org/.

 — Jenny David is a registered nurse, and is chair of Arizonans Fed Up With Failing Healthcare, a political committee that aims to put the Healthcare Rising Arizona initiative on the 2020 ballot.