In late March, as the coronavirus silently spread across New York City, Phara Souffrant Forrest, a maternal child health nurse running for state assembly in Brooklyn, called up a prospective voter. As soon as she introduced herself, the woman on the other end of the line interrupted.
"'Oh, you're a nurse?'" Forrest, 31, a democratic socialist, recalls her saying. The woman explained that her daughter was about to have a baby, and she worried she wouldn't be allowed in the hospital with her daughter while she was in labor. Her alarm was caused by two major hospital systems in the city that briefly banned visitors from the delivery room and postpartum recovery areas in an attempt to quell the spread of the virus; Gov. Andrew Cuomo had overruled the policies, but the woman was unaware of that. Forrest informed the woman that her daughter was entitled to one support person, telling her it was her right: "Make sure that person goes in with her."
Amid a global pandemic that has sown chaos and misinformation in health care and claimed more than 100,000 American lives, nurses' expertise is more relevant than ever.
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