Nurses Take Campaign for Safe Staffing Levels to Capitol Hill
Posted By
Mike Hall On July 14, 2008
AFL-CIO NOW BLOG
"The formula too many hospitals use today to establish nurse-to-patient ratios should be called the “whatever-we-can-get-away with” formula, says Suzanne Gordon, nursing professor and co-author of the new book,
Safety in Numbers: Nurse to Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care.
Gordon, along with representatives from four AFL-CIO nursing unions, met in a roundtable discussion with dozens of health care experts from the staffs of Senate and House members to explain the dangerous and sometimes tragic impact of understaffing on patient care that is also a major factor in driving nurses from the profession and the growing nurses shortage.
The roundtable, sponsored by the [1]
RNs Working Together, the coalition of 10 AFL-CIO unions representing more than 200,000 registered nurses, is one step in the campaign to build support on Capitol Hill for the first national nurse-to-patient ratio legislation (
H.R. 2123) introduced by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).
The bill would establish minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios to improve patient safety and quality of care, and to address the nursing shortage that has left our nation’s hospitals critically understaffed. This legislation would give nurses manageable patient loads, which would allow them to provide better care while also avoiding preventable medical errors. The bill would establish safe staffing standards in all hospitals, including hospitals that serve Medicare and Medicaid patients and federally operated hospitals.
Gordon, whose book traces how hospital cost cutting in the 1990s created huge new workloads for nurses and deteriorating patient care, told the group that more than 60 studies have documented that hospital understaffing results in more patient deaths, plus more preventable complications like pneumonia, urinary tract and catheter infections, and medication errors.
Ann Converso, a registered nurse and president of United American Nurses
UAN, noted that the need for safer staffing levels and higher patient care standards were the reasons some 700 Kentucky and West Virginia nurses, members of UAN, waged a three-month
strike last fall at the Appalachian Regional Hospital system.
The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee
CNA/NNOC was among the organizations spearheading the fight that won California’s first-in-the-nation law establishing a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio of one-to-five. Deborah Burger, an RN and president of CNN/NNOC, said that before the law was enacted, it was not uncommon to find a single nurse in charge of 8, 10, 12 or more patients on a shift.
Jan Nygaard, an RN who works in a VA hospital in Minnesota and who is an AFGE vice president, says nurses are dedicated to providing the best care possible and giving the correct medications and dosages.
What you do is try to do the best you can with what you’ve got.
But the unmanageable workload—mandatory overtime, double shifts, canceled days off—caused by nurse understaffing is the main reason behind the exodus of nurses from the profession and the resulting shortage. Some 500,000 RNs in the United States are not practicing their profession, according to a 2007
Business Week article.
Safe staffing levels would bring more nurses back into the field, and in California it already has, says Burger:
It made a difference almost overnight. From the time the bill was signed into law in 1999 to 2007, more than 80,000 nurses were added to the workforce."
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