Year: 2005
Location: Edmonton
Profile: Bev Dick, before her retirement in 2013, had been a UNA activist since its founding and served as first vice-president from 1995 to 2013. Dick graduated from the St. Michael’s School of Nursing in Lethbridge in 1973. She and her husband moved to Edmonton where she began her nursing career at the Misericordia Hospital. Soon after, she was asked to be a ward representative for the Staff Nurses Association of the Alberta Association of Registered Nurses. Most nurses found the ability of the AARN, the Albert disciplinary body for nurses, to negotiate their salaries and working conditions to be inadequate. In 1979, two years after UNA formed, Dick was elected as the Local president for the Misericordia. She became district representative from 1988 to 1995 before becoming vice-president.
Dick discusses the physical and emotional abuse that she experienced as a nurse and UNA’s efforts to establish rules to protect nurses from harassment by employers, patients, and patient family members. She also talks about the threats that some nurses faced from their own spouses for participating in illegal strikes and about the nurses having to protect a UNA member from her physically abusive husband while picketing during the 1988 strike.
Keywords: Abuses faced by nurses on the job; Alberta Association of Registered Nurses; District representative; Local president; Misericordia Hospital; Nursing shortage; Nursing strikes, 1980, 1982, 1988; St. Michael’s School of Nursing; Staff Nurses Association; Vice-president, UNA.
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See also: Occupational Health and Safety; United Nurses of Alberta; Women and Work in Alberta