Riding a wave of unprecedented organizing victories at Los Angeles County hospitals, the California Nurses Association is forming a new, more militant national nurses’ organization with a heavy emphasis on unionizing.

The organization, which the CNA is establishing with sister associations from four other states, would serve as an alternative to the American Nurses Association, viewed by the groups as an ineffectual voice for bedside nurses during the era of managed care and a nursing shortage.

“There isn’t a voice for staff nurses and patients. There’s a huge void in the U.S.,” said CNA President Kay McVay, a registered nurse. “We need to be able to spread the gospel across the nation.”

The CNA and nursing organizations from Massachusetts, Maine, Pennsylvania and Missouri took the first formal steps to form the organization with a meeting of top elected representatives May 23.

The groups agreed to some broad principles for the organization, including a commitment to safe staffing levels and opposition to mandatory overtime hot topics in California and across the nation as well as creating an institute to teach nurses how to organize non-union hospitals.

The organization would also fund a lobbyist to represent its interests in Washington, D.C.

“If we believe that we should be influential in health policy on a national basis, we need to contract for a lobbyist,” said Julie Pinkam, executive director of the Massachusetts association. “We need to be there full time.”

The CNA is moving to create the new group after a series of unprecedented unionization gains at eight California hospitals over the past two months added 2,000 nurses to its membership, now totaling 37,000. Four of those hospitals are in Los Angeles County.

Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Healthcare Association of Southern California, the region’s hospital industry trade group, said the union is looking to leverage its recent organizing victories.

But he said he does not believe the effort will get to the core of the problem: a labor shortage that is making nurses work harder.

“The unions have seen an opportunity and are seizing it, but the unions can’t make any more nurses materialize than we can,” Lott said. “The unions say (that hospitals) don’t want to spend money on nurses. I say (hospitals) have the money and are willing to spend it, but there are no nurses.”

The unions contend that the core reason for the shortage is cutbacks prompted by managed care that have increased patient-to-nurse ratios, making the profession unattractive to new entrants in the job market.

The CNA broke off from the current national association in 1995 after deciding that the ANA was more interested in representing managerial nurses than the rank-and-file. Cindy Price, a spokeswoman for the 176,000-member ANA, said the national organization is sorry to see the state groups on their way to forming a rival association something she contends would only splinter the voices of nurses nationally.

“The ANA feels that an organization for nurses is strong when we all work together,” Price said. “It’s a duplication of efforts. We are fighting for the same issues as these organizations.”