Sunsetting our Mental Health Campaign Statement

June 3, 2026

For the past four years, ANA\California has worked to elevate the ongoing mental health crisis affecting nurses and to push for solutions that match the reality of nursing work. We launched this campaign because nurses have been carrying this issue for decades, and because the conditions that drive distress and burnout are still present in too many care settings.

Over the course of this campaign, we gained a clearer view of what is holding progress back and what it will take to make change stick. Nurses' mental health is inseparable from the work environment, including staffing, workload, missed breaks, workplace violence, and moral injury. Support programs can help some nurses, but they are not a system-level fix, and privacy concerns, stigma, and lack of trust often constrain adoption. We also saw that even when nurses are most visible in public conversation, policy solutions can still stall. Without structural change inside healthcare organizations and sustained policy action, the burden keeps landing on individual nurses and a small number of committed leaders trying to patch gaps with limited tools.

Even without a single “finish line” policy outcome, this work produced meaningful outputs and learning:

• We convened two panel discussions with subject matter experts and nurse leaders to surface barriers and practical paths forward.

• We gathered insights from nurse leaders, HR teams, EAP providers, risk management, and mental health experts about what is working and what is not.

• We published resources to help leaders assess options, including our review of mental health services and solutions available to nurse professionals.

• We strengthened shared language about the core issue: nurses’ mental health cannot be addressed without changing the conditions of nursing work.

  
  

Our decision

Based on what we learned, we are sunsetting this campaign as a standalone effort so we can focus our capacity on strategies with the strongest near-term path to impact. This is not a step back from the issue. It is a shift in how we pursue it, grounded in what four years of work showed us about where change is most achievable right now.

What’s next

We will continue to target the root drivers of nurse mental health through ANA\California’s policy and systems work, with a focus on reducing systemic stressors and strengthening nurses’ power in decisions that shape care delivery. That includes work to reduce documentation burden, improve the conditions that drive moral injury and burnout, and advance campaigns that make nurses visible and influential as decision-makers in policy and in the public narrative.

Call to action

If you want to stay involved, follow our campaign updates and share what you are seeing in your workplace or community. Your experience helps determine what we prioritize next and what solutions we push for.