Nursing Priorities

Nurses advocate for their patients and in their workplace and communities— legislative, regulatory, and political advocacy is no less important to advancing the profession and patient care. While ANA champions a range of issues, you can learn about our key policy and government affairs priorities and issue buckets below.

2025 Congressional Priorities

2025 Regulatory & Policy Priorities

Work Environment

Workplace Violence Prevention: Ensuring health care facilities and offices have a violence prevention plan and working closely with Congress and the Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA) to create a national standard for violence prevention.

Mandatory Overtime Prohibitions: Eliminating mandatory overtime requirements for nurses while continuing to allow nurses to obtain overtime if they choose to do so and believe they can do so safely.

Mental Health Resources: Ensuring nurses have the mental health resources and the support they need to thrive.

Staffing: Working with Congress, federal agencies, and states to improve nurse staffing to ensure patient safety, avoid burn-out and deliver high quality care that only nurses can provide.

Surgical Smoke: Building off success at passing surgical smoke elimination laws and regulations in several states, ANA is pursuing federal legislation to require the availability and use of surgical smoke evacuation devices in all operating rooms.

Workforce

Title VIII: Working to maintain and increase funding for nurse training and education across all levels of education in the largest federal program that supports nursing education. We will continue to emphasize professional ladders to ensure nurses can continue to progress in careers and

Faculty and Preceptor Support: Supporting legislative and regulatory efforts to increase the number of nurse faculty and preceptors to mee the growing demand for nurses.

Access & Outcomes

Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) Full Practice Authority: Allowing nurses to work at the top of their licenses and working as efficiently as possible to meet patient needs.

Addressing Social Determinants of Health (SDoH): Emphasizing the need to address SDoH based upon socio-economic, as well as racial, gender, sexual orientation, religious and condition specific needs and challenges.

Women’s & Maternal Health Care: Tackling the national maternal morbidity and mortality crisis and addressing inadequate maternal health care remains a priority as is a specific attention to the unique needs of women of color. As well as, ensuring women across the country have unfettered access to the medical care they need for all aspects of their lives and health.

Medicaid: Protecting the health care safety nest is critical for patient access but also as a foundational program for our health care system. Medicaid is the single largest payer within our health system. Medicaid funding and related policies will have direct impact on nursing access, reimbursement and

The business of Nursing

Taxes: Ensuring changes to tax policy do not negatively impact nurses, professional associations and that nurses can maximize advantages from tax initiatives related to health care professionals.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Ensuring ANA has a voice in the development, and use of AI tools with an impact on nursing.

Charitable Status: Monitoring changes in federal or state policies that impact the tax status of ANA, ANCC and ANF and healthcare facilities.

Payment Policy/Reimbursement: Advocating for enhanced transparency in reimbursement for nursing services and ensuring that payment policy incentivizes improved nurse staffing and patient access to nurses’ expertise.

Prior-Authorization: Addressing proposed changes to reduce the provider burden on nurses related to payer policies.

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Nursing Priorities