About AFT Nurses and Health Professionals

AFT Nurses and Health Professionals is driving the fight for safe staffing through collective bargaining and legislation, with recent landmark legislative victories in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington. These victories, won through the tireless advocacy of union nurses and health professionals, will save lives, protect patients and change the national landscape for safe staffing.

Learn more about our Code Red campaign here.

AFT Nurses and Health Professionals—first known as the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals and later as AFT Healthcare—was created in 1978 when the AFT constitution was amended to allow organizing and affiliation of healthcare workers. Since its creation, the division has grown to represent 200,000 health professionals across a wide variety of disciplines and settings.

In the past 10 years, nearly 100,000 health professionals across the nation have joined our union with thousands organizing each year, making AFT Nurses and Health Professionals the fastest-growing healthcare union in the country and the second-largest nurses union in the AFL-CIO.

AFT NHP members are represented by locals across the nation with a significant presence in Alaska, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

If you want to learn more about organizing a union at your workplace, particularly to address staffing issues, please reach out to us at formaftunion@aft.org.

In addition to safe staffing, our union advocates for other issues impacting health professionals, including addressing workplace violence and other workplace safety issues; scope of practice and licensure of health professions; protecting and expanding access to high-quality healthcare for all; addressing health inequities; and developing a strong and diverse healthcare workforce.

Every year, AFT NHP hosts a national professional issues conference where members learn about and discuss issues that affect healthcare workers throughout the country. We also host special conferences, trainings and webinars, and provide other opportunities for collaboration and continuing education. AFT Nurses and Health Professionals is one of only a few AFL-CIO unions accredited as a provider of continuing education in nursing.

The AFT Nurses and Health Professionals program and policy council and our Registered Nurses program and policy council help guide the division’s work on healthcare workforce and policy issues, and also assist in the development of divisional priorities and program activities.

For more information, contact Kelly Nedrow, senior director of AFT Health Issues, at knedrow@aft.org.