As access to health care is broadened through national health care reform, Sen. Patty Murray believes even more nurses and other health care workers will be needed locally and across the nation in the future.

In an effort to bring attention to the local and national shortage of nurses and other critical health care workers, Murray held a news conference at St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor today.

Murray also discussed her efforts to include federal funding in national health care reform legislation that will address workforce issues of the future.

The senator visited the MRI suite and Rick Wendt, the manager of the Radiology Department, informed her of the capabilities of the MRI unit at SAH and talked about the difficulty of recruiting Radiology techs which was pertinent to her topic of workforce enhancements. Two of Wendt's techs who were there had benefited from scholarships and internships offered through Tacoma Communty College's Rad Tech program.

While it looks like in this picture Murray is visiting with a patient, it's really a training "dummy" named "mega-code Kelly." It had been set up earlier in the day for staff training and was left there for the Murray event to demonstrate how on-site training sometimes happens. The dummy was connected to an ekg machine and the dummy can be programmed to show different heart rythms and has components that mimic pulse and respirations as well as other clinical signs to train nurses to assess patients.