As a nurse for over 16 years, I’ve worked in both bedside and administration. I have seen the unintentional gross neglect of patients due to short staffing for more years than I care to count. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the entire healthcare system, however, that’s a battle for another day.
By federally mandating a national standardized safe nursing ratio it benefits our patients, our staff, and the healthcare system as a whole. Safe staffing decreases patient mortality rates, decreases their length of stay, and decreases complications. With fewer patients, nurses are more readily available to give individualized care, monitor patients more closely, and respond quicker to needs. All of these things lead to greater patient satisfaction, which helps the reimbursement rates for hospitals. Nurses become less burned out, becoming more likely to stay at a facility or at the bedside, which has become increasingly more difficult to find nurses who are willing to do bedside care.
Hospitals also benefit from lower staff turn over ratios due to frustration over short staffing. This alone could save hospitals unspeakable amounts of money, not only in the cost of a new hire, but also in decreasing the need for per diem staff or travelers. Not to mention the cost of sign on bonuses. Safe staffing provides a better work environment, giving hospitals a better reputation amongst healthcare staff, thus giving them more negotiating power when reviewing potential new hires.
Most importantly, IT WILL SAVE LIVES!! I cannot emphasize this enough. Your loved ones, your family is at risk every single day they are in a hospital with unsafe staffing, and unfortunately nurses can only do so much. Working with too many patients and no ancillary staff (CNAs, PCTs, Phlebotomist, Transport, etc.) only increases the workload and responsibility on the nurse , who now has even less time to take care of your loved one.
We who chose this profession do so with an open heart and a will to want to give the best possible care we can. We are the chosen healers and we only want the tools given to us so that we can do that. We want to decrease medication errors, reduce patient falls, increase communication, increase patient care and patient and family satisfaction.
Mandating safe staffing insures that hospitals or hospital systems can’t get greedy and use less staffing to make more money. Safe staffing ensures the best possible care to your family member. Decreases the likelihood of readmission because we discharge people to have the bed for sicker people, just because we don’t have the staff to care for all of them. Help us help others. Help us be the best healthcare providers we can be.
They attempted to pass bills in 2021 and 2023, both times it went to the committee on health and just died. The bills were a start but it left the ratio up to the hospitals. California has proven it works. National Nurses united put out ratios, that make sense. Leaving the ratios up to the money hungry Medical facilities has only put lives in danger and caused seasoned nurses to flee the bedside. I worked bedside, home care, managed care and bedside again. There was a time you would have 1:5 on a telemetry unit with an Aide and you had the time and attention patients needed. By the time i left bedside 2 years ago, telemetry was 1:8 with no aides. There is no time for patient care, none. Units are so short staffed of seasoned nurses that you have new grads risking their licenses and the lives of patients acting as charge nurses. Nurses are burnt out, many leave the bedside because of the short staffed conditions and the fact they can not deliver care to the patients they should be getting. Nothing will change unless they pass a law. RFK is our best chance at meaningful change to the health care system. Nurses have been shouting from the roof tops but no one has been listening.