Nurses union urges Congress to pass legislation targeting ‘unsafe’ staffing levels

It’s our time to be heard from the people who ACTUALLY take care of patients and know what we are talking about!! Nurses unite! Because I know everyone is tired and sick and tired of being dismissed!

As an RN of 31 years I was a ‘new’ nurse when these practices began. Many times they came out of a supposed revamping/rethinking of the hospital’s way of doing things but the (planned) result was that nurses were forced to take on higher patient loads with less staff support. A normal patient load of 5-6 patients on a non-telemetry floor with CNA support for non-nursing tasks became a patient load of 12-13 patients on a telemetry floor with no CNA. support. This also extended to no secretarial support so the nurses had to answer all of the incoming telephone calls as well. One hospital decided to get rid of almost all ancillary support and the nurses were required to clean patient rooms, draw blood and fix the patient’s meals. I was an administrator at this hospital and was frequently dealing with complaints from patients and families that they did not want the person who cleaned the toilet starting their IV. Also, with the high nurse patient ratios without additional help, I often had complaints that a patient’s loved one had been on a bed pan for 30-45 minutes and no one was answering the call light to get them off. I would be called to a floor with 24 patients, 2 nurses and no additional help because a patient was having chest pain tying up both nurses while they were transferring a patient to ICU and none of the other patients on the floor had received any care including medications for over an hour. Ideally situations such as this would never occur because hospitals have nurses in positions of leadership who should object to such ridiculous staffing ratios or the elimination of persons in support of nursing workloads, however, these nurses do not object to these proposals. Apparently, because hospital leadership is unwilling to consider anything except the bottom line, nurse patient ratios require legislation to keep our loved ones safe when they are hospitalized. We have been talking about the nursing shortage since the 1980’s when in reality the nursing shortage is a direct result of these working conditions. After a nurse graduates the average amount of time they work as a nurse is 5 years. Nurses have the highest rate of back injuries on the job and this includes construction workers. I believe if legislation was put in place so nurses were not exposed to these untenable workloads nursing turnover wouldn’t be nearly as high. I also wanted to comment on calls to restrict nursing pay due to high incentives being paid during the pandemic. With the amount of education, intelligence and responsibilities nurses have, what they were being paid during the pandemic is much closer to what they should be paid all of the time. Also, if we are going to complain about being overpaid, why not look at the surgeon charging $20,000 or more for a 2 hour surgery. Julie Maynard RN, CCRN, TNS

"This bill requires hospitals to implement and submit to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a staffing plan that complies with specified minimum nurse-to-patient ratios by unit." This legislation doesn't specify ratios but should. What will the ratios be? If hospitals were going to implement safe staffing it would have happened by now.