[General E. Speaking, RN]

I have a presentation to do for nursing school and chose mandated nurse patient ratios as my topic. I would appreciate any help in finding recent nursing or other professional journal articles to use a resources.

I know this topic has been discussed on this forum and many of you have passionate views regarding this issue. Any help in finding some journal articles will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Kris

[suzanne4]

The only state that has in place ratio laws for hospitals is CA. There are several others that have been talking about it, but there is nothing as of yet that has been put in place. There actually is a law and that makes hospitals accountable to the state when they do not meet the requirements with staffing.

Having something that is mandated and something that has been put into law are two very different things.

Check out the CA forum, there is much there on this topic.

[ambhee04]

Check out this website www.calnurses.org. this is the union that fought for years to get the law passed .
Good luck!

[marie-francoise]

You should mention the Aiken study. Here are two links:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12387650

http://www.dpeaflcio.org/programs/factsheets/fs_aiken.pdf

You may want to look into the money-driven nature of the health care system today, and how hospitals don't hire enough nursing staff in order to save money, or send them off the unit if they think there are "too many" nurses for that day's census. It seems as though hospitals create their own internal "nursing shortage" by deliberately maintaining unsafe ratios.

[General E. Speaking, RN]

My computer was getting worked on so I am a little late in replying. Thanks for the responses!