NYSNA Elects Ballard

By MEREDITH KOLODNER

Karen Ballard defeated Anne Bove with 55 percent of the vote to become the new president-elect of the New York State Nurses Association, the group announced last week.

KAREN BALLARD: Gets nod at NYSNA.

Ms. Ballard bested Ms. Bove by a tally of 1,258 to 1,033. Members also elected J. Howard Doughty as NYSNA's treasurer and four new at-large members to its board of directors. Officers serve for two years and are limited to two consecutive terms.

Others Elected

With less than 10 percent of NYSNA's 34,000 members voting by mail and on-line, Miriam Gonzalez, Lydia Lopez, Jose Mapalad Planillo and incumbent Winifred Kennedy were the top four vote-getters among 12 candidates for the at-large board of director seats.

President-elects serve for two years and then succeed the former president. Linda O'Brien, a 45-year nursing veteran, is the new president. She spent most of her 27 years as a NYSNA member at Patchogue's Brookhaven Memorial Medical Center in Suffolk County. "Basically I think our priorities will stay the same," she said: "to protect the patients and improve working conditions."

Ms. O'Brien said the group hopes to get a bill prohibiting mandatory overtime for nurses passed through the state legislature, where it stalled earlier this year. "Cutbacks in staffing create the whole mandatory overtime monster," she said. She added that advocating for universal single-payer health care was also a top concern for the state's nurses.

Ms. Ballard is a nurse consultant who lives in Manhattan and has worked at New York Hospital, Mount Sinai Medical Center, City College School of Nursing, Bellevue Hospital, and Terrace Heights Hospital in Hollis. She is chair of the Nurses' Workgroup for the environmental organization Health Care Without Harm. She was not available for comment at press time.