Her passion is nurse safety: 'It's saving healthcare workers' lives'

Betty Long doesn't understand politics.

It's not that she is new to what Ronald Reagan called the world's second oldest profession.

As a nationally recognized expert on patient advocacy, Long, a Wyndmoor resident, has testified before Congress. So she's familiar with the arena.

Yet even with her experience, politics leaves her, to use her word, "flummoxed."

For instance, during the Biden Administration, the Department of Labor convened a committee to address the bureaucratic red tape insurers use to deny patient claims. Long traveled to Washington to testify about the "ridiculousness" of the denials.

"You would think … that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid would want to do something about this crazy bureaucracy that puts so much burden on physicians and hospitals to prove that they are doing the right thing," says Long, MHA, RN, president and chief executive officer of Guardian Nurses Healthcare Advocates Inc. in Flourtown.

The committee and CMS did nothing.

She returned to Washington a year ago to support the Save Healthcare Workers Act. The bipartisan bill with 40 co-sponsors would make it a federal crime to physically or verbally attack nurses and hospital personnel. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "nearly half of all nurses report experiencing physical violence and 68% have faced verbal abuse."

If that bill sounds like a slam dunk, a year later it's still languishing in committee.

"I'm flummoxed," Long says. "It's saving healthcare workers' lives. This is not a heavy lift."

But Long is far from resigned. She's determined to spread the word about the bill. It's her latest "passion project" in a career made of passion projects.

Way back when, Long wanted to be a sports writer like her idol, the legendary Frank Deford. Graduating from Temple University with a journalism degree, she scored an office assistant job at The Philadelphia Inquirer. She seemed on her way.

But during her senior year at Temple, Long's mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died four months later. Long was so impressed by the nursing care her mother received that it changed the trajectory of her life. A year later, Long forfeited her sports writing dream and entered nursing school.

"My family was like, what?" she remembers.

Over the years, Long worked as a floor nurse at several area hospitals, eventually rising to a supervisory position. That's when she began to notice a communication gap between medical staff and patients and their families about the care plan.

The disconnect struck home in 1999, when Long's 80-plus-year-old Uncle George fell down the steps and had a brain bleed. The resident was explaining to her aunt that George needed a breathing tube.

"She turned around and looked at me and had this look on her face and I thought, I wonder what do other families do that don't have a nurse to explain what is going on?" Long said.

At that moment, the idea for Guardian Nurses was born. Long would create a nursing service that would help patients navigate the medical maze. It took four years to convert the idea into a business Even then, the first year wasn't easy.

"I had a great idea but I didn't know how to make it a business," she said. "I made $15,000 the first year and thought well, this is going to be a great hobby."

The business became real when a friend mentioned that the Philadelphia Police Union Health and Welfare Fund was looking for a nurse to help its members.

"I was like, perfect, I can do that," she said.

She got the contract and in the first year helped 49 patients. But before renewing, the fund manager said he wanted to calculate the return on investment, or ROI, to find out if her work was actually saving money.

"I was like, what's an ROI?" she recalled.

Long hired a consultant to run the numbers. The result? A $1.7 million return on investment for the fund.

"The experience encouraged me to go to other unions," she said. "So I just started to grow the business."

A decade later, Long was searching for ways to make Guardian more proactive for patients. Her answer is the Mobile Care Coordinator program, in which nurses work with patients with acute, complex or chronic illnesses.

Nurses accompany patients to doctor visits, visit them in the hospital, support follow-up care, and where needed find and coordinate assistance programs and deal with insurance issues.

From the sole proprietor 23 years ago, Guardian has grown to 61 nurses. While most of its 22 programs are located in the mid-Atlantic region, it has two in Seattle, two in Long Island, and one each in Buffalo, Plattsburg, and Syracuse, New York, and southern New Jersey.

Now Long is turning her attention and energy to the Save Healthcare Workers Act. She became interested in the bill in 2024 after reading about three Penn Presbyterian Medical Center nurses who were seriously injured when struck by a car as they attended a shooting victim outside of the emergency department.

During a staff meeting, Long asked her nurses to raise their hands if they had ever been physically or verbally assaulted. Thirty-nine of the 61 nurses raised their hands.

"My stomach flipped," she said. "I think that it is unconscionable that we are allowing this. There aren't consequences."

When the Save Healthcare Workers bill failed to make it out of committee, Long asked why. After all, a similar law was passed to protect airline pilots and flight attendants.

"Why are they drawing the line at nurses?" Long said. "Are we not important enough? There are more than four million of us. I get pretty worked up."

Long may not understand politics. But 23 years ago, she didn't understand anything about business. And that turned out pretty well. Now she is applying that same determination to getting word out about the bill.

"I feel like the campaign that we're doing is just about educating the public so they can say to their elected officials, 'Hey, what are you doing about the Save Healthcare Workers bill?"' Long said. "I think for me individually, this passion project is really to see this bill see the light of day."