Three New UNAC/UHCP Officers Elected at Historic Convention

May 2013

On Saturday, over 400 delegates representing UNAC/UHCP affiliates all over Southern California came together to elect three new UNAC/UHCP officers in a historic election that will shape our Union for decades to come.

At UNAC/UHCP's founding convention in 1972, convention delegates elected four officers to lead the Union. Since that time, at most two officers have been elected at one time at any given convention. On May 18, we elected three, the most in 40 years.

Delegates at the 2013 special convention first voted to expand the officer structure from our previous two, to four, adding three additional officers to serve as UNAC/UHCP Executive Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer. The impact of these three new officers cannot be overstated. They will move our Union to the next level.

UNAC/UHCP is pleased to announce the three new officers, elected by over 400 UNAC/UHCP special convention delegates, who will help guide UNAC/UHCP for years to come:

Denise Duncan, RN, our newly elected Executive Vice President, is a long-time activist with the union. Starting out as a local Steward and then becoming Kaiser Woodland Hills Registered Nurses Association Secretary and eventually President. She was then recruited to join UNAC/UHCP as a Staff Representative, where she’s participated in almost every Kaiser negotiation since 1992 and found time to help out the organizing department with campaigns for Tenet and NUHHCE. She worked with the political team on the historic staffing ratio bill that is now state law, meeting with the Governor twice and testifying at the Board of Registered Nursing. Denise even was the co-researcher on "Nurse Perceptions of Medication Errors" article published in the Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 2004, the first time working nurses had been asked their perceptions around error and cause.

Charmaine Morales, RN, our new Secretary, comes to us from the Kaiser South Bay affiliate, where she’s risen from a stand-out steward to a Political Action Chair, 2012 Contract Specialist, and the affiliate Parliamentarian. During the 2011 contract battle at St. Francis, Charmaine organized an entire bus of South Bay members to picket with the St. Francis nurses, had they gone out on strike which luckily they did not. Instead, Charmaine organized a picket line with nurses at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, and led her affiliate’s work supporting UFCW’s local members during their contract battles in the summer of 2012. Last December, Charmaine led the organization of over 700 people walking the picket line in front of Kaiser South Bay to protest the Reductions in Force.

Our new Treasurer is Jettie Deden-Castillo, NP, served as Executive Council Representative for the Kaiser Downey Registered Nurses Association affiliate for three years. Jettie was a member of the Scholarship Committee and helped to organize the specialty nurses, CNMs, and WOCNs, who later became the two affiliates SCNSC and KPMWON. Jettie tells us that she wants to use her position to unify the UNAC/UHCP affiliates and to campaign at SPNN for more dues-paying members.

More information about the newly elected officers will be available in the next edition our member newsletter, The Voice. Our thanks to the new officers, for their willingness to give their time and energies to the advancement of our Union, to the benefit of our patients and our members.