RNs pack hearing,renew call for staffing bill..........

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Specializes in Critical-care RN.
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Nurses need to go to the public and get support from them.

Why are there staffing ratios in the schools, day care centers, etc, but not in hospitals? DSHS closes day care centers if the the staffing drops below required levels. Teachers refuse more students if the numbers would go above the set number. Yet, no one ever died because they could not do long division, or diagram a sentence. But how many patients die, or have poor outcomes from deliberate understaffing?

This is information that the public needs to know. Teachers go rght to the public with classroom concerns, nurses need to do that as well.

How about another idea? Just say no!! Charge Nurses, set the staffing for, say 1 nurse 4 patients on med surge, and tell admistration that they need two more nurses, or whatever. Nurses, only take 4 patients. Period. Let administration run to find more nurses when the nursing staff will not take more patients and there are patients who have no nurse assigned to them. Stand firm together and hold your ground. Martyr marys step aside as the true patient advocates go to work!

Civil disobedience works wonders!

JMHO and my NY $0.02.

Lindarn, RN, BSN, CCRN

Somewhere in the PACNW

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I agree totally but lets be real folks, when they lay your @#$% off, and you have no food to feed your family or pay your bills, what will you do? Lets all find a way to to this while maintaining our jobs

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Specializes in Geriatrics, Home Health.

Why stop at hospitals? Get mandatory ratios for LTC and rehab centers, too.

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Why stop at hospitals? Get mandatory ratios for LTC and rehab centers, too.

Couldn't agree more with that - every person dependent on a health care facility for their survival and well being deserves the quality care that ratios provide. But it's a heck of a fight to get them won.

A few miscellaneous comments: I came into the California Nurses Association just at the tail end of the fight for ratios, so I know that story mostly second hand. But I know it fairly well.

It was a hard fight and a long one - passed the bill through the legislature once, the governor vetoed it. Came back the following year and passed it again. This time there was a different governor and he signed it. They did indeed enlist the general public in a wide variety of ways - newpaper and billboard ads, community town hall meetings, etc. And a lot of legislators who ought to have been on the right side took some serious pressure to vote for it. Every time there was a major hearing or vote, CNA brought hundreds, in some cases thousands of nurses to Sacramento to rally in support. After it passed and went to the governor, we (I was a member by then) did the biggest rally of all on the steps of the capitol to demand the governor sign it.

Then the fight was only half won, because the law delegated the actual setting of the ratios to the Department of Health Services (now Department of Public Health). They held hearings at which the hospital association testified that the correct ratio should be 10-1 and where another union testified that LVNs should count equal to RNs in the ratios. So there was a massive year-long mobilisation around all that process. Finally got the regs in place and then a year later Arnold was governor and he tried to roll them back. That ignited a year-long war in which we sued him (and eventually won) and followed him to every single public event he did for a full year - over a hundred demonstrations. That turned out to be a pretty good learning experience, since no politician since has really dared to mess with them after what we did to him.

Bottom line: ratios can be won, but it takes a powerful union, an engaged membership and an informed public - and even then, the time and conditions have to be right.

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Specializes in Utilization Management; Case Management.
I agree totally but lets be real folks, when they lay your @#$% off, and you have no food to feed your family or pay your bills, what will you do? Lets all find a way to to this while maintaining our jobs

NO offense to you at all, I'm just saying...

This type of thinking, I believe, is why we are in the position we are. Realistically...if everyone rallied together, how would we be fired? Who are they going to replace us with? There aren't enough travel, per diem, new grads, etc in the world...plus, good news! 9 times out of 10 they have the same issues, or soon will once they begin to work for facility.

In my opinion, if one does not know their worth, what can really be expected??

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NO offense to you at all, I'm just saying...

This type of thinking, I believe, is why we are in the position we are. Realistically...if everyone rallied together, how would we be fired? Who are they going to replace us with? There aren't enough travel, per diem, new grads, etc in the world...plus, good news! 9 times out of 10 they have the same issues, or soon will once they begin to work for facility.

In my opinion, if one does not know their worth, what can really be expected??

One of my personal little hobby horses: the biggest thing holding back nurses is nurses. Our self-sacrificial, fearful and co-dependant natures that prevent too many nurses from being willing to stand up for themselves. Every time we go into bargaining for a contract, I hear some nurses say things like "oh, we shouldn't ask for too much, management might not be able to afford it". There's a germ of truth in there, in that one does have to be realistic, but it's management's job to tell us if they can't afford what we are asking for, not our job to think we shouldn't ask. When we were bargaining our first contract, we sent out updates to the nurses about what was happening at the bargaining table. At one of our membership meetings, a nurse got up and said "I don't like to read those updates, because sometimes they say things about management that aren't nice". I remember thinking "I'll bet none of the male dominated unions ever have to worry about that".

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Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
One of my personal little hobby horses: the biggest thing holding back nurses is nurses. Our self-sacrificial, fearful and co-dependant natures that prevent too many nurses from being willing to stand up for themselves. Every time we go into bargaining for a contract, I hear some nurses say things like "oh, we shouldn't ask for too much, management might not be able to afford it". There's a germ of truth in there, in that one does have to be realistic, but it's management's job to tell us if they can't afford what we are asking for, not our job to think we shouldn't ask. When we were bargaining our first contract, we sent out updates to the nurses about what was happening at the bargaining table. At one of our membership meetings, a nurse got up and said "I don't like to read those updates, because sometimes they say things about management that aren't nice". I remember thinking "I'll bet none of the male dominated unions ever have to worry about that".

Not to mention the vulture nurses who swoop in to gather the spoils of hospital negotiation gone bad.

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Nurses have never used the power of public opinion to help them out. Teachers have done it since the beginning of time, and they always get what they want.

Research has finally been done, that proves that understaffing kills patients, and/or, leaves them with bad outcomes.

Why have nurses not printed up leaflets, stood in the front of the hospital, and educated the public about this? The public thinks that nurses are just whiny women (sorry guys!), and all we do is fluff pillow, and hand out water pitchers.

Nurses need to join together with the NNOC, and become a power to be reckoned with.

There is NO doubt in my mind, that hospitals are terrified of that very scenario ever coming about. They are terrified of the nurses finally taking control of our profession. It is the same actions, that was used in the South to keep the slaves under their control. Keep them uneducated, so they are trapped in the job they are in, with no reasonable chance to break away.

That is why hospitals do not want to pay nurses more for a BSN. If everyone got their BSN, we would ask for more money, like PT and OT did. In years past, when the norm was for nurses to be educated in a hospital diploma program, nurses were trapped. The only jobs available were hospitals, doctors offices, clinics, and schools. Diploma nursing classes were not transferrable to a college, because they were not college credits. If a nurse wanted to go back to school for a BSN, they had to start with Nursing science 1A.

Nurses rarely went back to school with these impediments put in front of them. So nurses remaine, "barefoot and pregnant", being the lowest educated health care professionals in the hospitals. And that is the way hospitals want to keep it.

We need to beat them at their own game, by organizing en masse with the NNOC, and put ourselves in the front of health care.

JMHO and my NY $0.02.

Lindarn, RN,BSN,CCRN

Somewhere in the PACNW

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Don't laugh!Here in Spokane, one of the in one of the hospitals voted out SEIU because they were making disparaging remarks about the hospital, (true statements), but the nurses were upset about it!!

Talk about, stupid is as stupid does. The working conditions and pay are far below what the other hospitals make, there is NO job protection, new nurse leave for better options as soon as they can. Management changes the rules to suit themselves, all because the nurses were upset about what was said about the hospital by the union, that was all true!

This is the hospital that was like the last one in Washington State to unionize, and it was a battle to get the "martry marys", to vote them in. They are now back to square one if they want to unionize again.

Now, the RTs, X-ray techs, nurses aides, housekeeping, etc, are all unionized, but not the nurses. These groups unionized a few years ago, when the hospital made an arbitrary across the board pay cut, for everyone except the employees who had contracts. They were re-designing each department, in a way, that everyone believed that they were planning on firing all of the employees in these departments, and bringing in outside companies, so everyone would have to bid for their jobs back with this new company. At lower salaries, and less benefits, of course. What can I say? Live and learn, for all, except nurses. We never learn.

JMHO and my NY $0.02.

Lindarn, RN,BSN,CCRN

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Specializes in Utilization Management; Case Management.

I am a newbie still, 1 year and a half in the game. 11months Med-Surg then txfr'd to the ICU critical care program so after a rotation on StepDown I'm now a month or so into my ICU orientation (approx 4 months long). My hospital as a union...never seen a rep honestly...contract been in negotiations since before I started working there...

Crazy thing is as the newbie I was trying to stir the flame in the beginning, like 'we have to stand together and say no to the 9th patient', 'clock out no lunch' when we drink juice to keep our blood sugar up and chart and only use the bathroom when we are near accident. But they just said "no it wont work", complain to each other and suck it up when bosslady comes around. These women and men were old enough to be my parents...and if these were my parents I would tell them they were punking out. I saw similar fire in the many new RNs that came after I did...and sadly it often went...

Now that I am new to yet another place I'm bottom of the stack but I see RNs that run circles around some Docs I've met and I see our trauma docs and neuro guys come to the bedside and ask RNs what they need. What I see now in the ICU makes me see how mismatched this really are...

Sometimes I feel like I'm going mad bc I had no idea nursing was gonna be like this. I love what I do but the state of things breaks my heart. I've never wanted to be anything else but a nurse, this is my life now. I'm willing to fight for my worth, I just wish more of my nursing family would do the same...

Sorry for the rant...had to let it out... ::smile:: Crazy me but when I learned to critically think I applied it to all things...and from my assessment sumthin aint right folks... Am I right, or am I right?

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Nurses have power but are either not comfortable with it or not sure how to use it. ICU nurses must be very autonomous to not get overwhelmed so I'm never surprised. That being said they also have historically the only guaranteed ratios with out a union contract outside of California.

It is sad to say but you can see here in these forums nurses have this strange way of holding on to these bad employers. I often joke that if conditions were this way at their children's school they would be all over that principal & school board like white on rice.

I hope you never lose that fire. Nurses don't deserve to be treated so poorly. Remember a union is only a tool. The nurses themselves have to learn to enforce that contract or it's just useless.

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