Nurses are speaking out about staff-to-patient ratios in hospitals nationwide. They say poor staffing is putting a strain on patient care.
“The biggest problem in our nation's hospitals is intentional understaffing by hospital employers. It is not a shortage of educated and trained nurses, ” said Jean Ross, the president of National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the United States.
The union is pushing to empower nurses and protect patients. They say nurses are being stretched too thin, with little staffing support.
Rhonda Rhisner, a nurse at the Dayton VA, said hospitals were mostly to blame for the staffing crisis, and the act could hold them accountable.
"The staffing crisis we are experiencing now is a result of years of the hospital employer's neglect and intentional policies of short staffing and cost cutting measures with zero regard to patient safety,” Rhisner said.
In a statement to WYSO, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association said mandatory staffing levels would only make the problem worse. “As hospitals continue to recover from COVID-19, mandating staffing levels would only further exacerbate current staffing challenges, thereby jeopardizing our hospitals’ ability to meet the diverse needs of our 11 counties, ” the statement said.
GDAHA emphasized that the solutions are best sought at local hospital levels.
“Imposing staffing mandates on hospitals would eliminate the necessary, local decision-making that allows hospitals to remain nimble and meet a community’s clinical care needs while upholding established patient safety and quality standards," the statement continued.
In March, U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the Nurse Staffing Standards for Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Care Act.
They argued that this legislation would ensure that nurses are adequately staffed and provide better patient care.
The federal bill mirrors the California nurse staffing mandate, which took effect in 2004.
“Right now, there's no concrete enforceable rule for minimum staffing levels in hospitals," Senator Brown said. "That not only that not only hurts overworked nurses, it also too often puts patients at risk.”
Nurses say this low staffing puts them in an ethical crisis as well. A recent survey by the National Nurses United found that over half of hospital nurses said that hospitals used excessive overtime to staff units.
"You have to prioritize that care and say, do I take care of this person who can't breathe? Or do I let this person lay in a wet depends for hours,” Rhisner said. “And those things are distressing to us as nurses because, of course we want to do both, but we're unable to do that.”
