The use of mandatory overtime for nurses has caused a public health crisis in this country. It is unconscionable that, in this healthcare environment when nurses must care for more patients and hospitalized patients are sicker than ever before, it is demanded we work forced 12, 14, and even 16-hour shifts. Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare industry. It is the nurse who patients and their families rely on to make clinical observations and decisions on a dime, because their own lives depend on it. Would any person want his own mother or child cared for by a bleary-eyed, exhausted nurse who is forced to be at work against her will? Cared for by a nurse who because of her exhaustion, because she has already worked her scheduled shift didn't notice that Mom's breathing is a bit more labored than it was an hour ago? If the nurse weren't so exhausted, she may have picked up that cue and maybe Mom's congestive heart failure might have been prevented.

Mandatory overtime has no regard for family values. Nursing is predominantly a profession of women, women with children or parents to care for at home. Many of those women are single mothers. Imagine being told near the end of your shift that you must stay for another 8 hours and will be threatened with discipline or termination if you refuse. Imagine that your child stands terrified, waiting for you at the school bus stop because you were forced to stay at work and couldn't be there to pick him up. Or imagine that nurses are left with no option but to bring their children onto a hospital unit while they work, because there is no one else to take care of them. No nurse should ever have to choose between her license and the safety of her children.

No nurse should ever have to go on strike over mandatory overtime. That's just what happened 1 year ago to me and the nurses that I work with at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. Our bargaining unit was so fortunate that Congressman McGovern and Senator Kennedy helped to end our 49-day strike and that we got the contract language that allows nurses to refuse overtime if they feel too tired to practice safely. But thousands of nurses in Massachusetts and millions of nurses around this country don't have a union and even if they do, don't have contract language preventing the use of mandatory overtime at their facility.

This legislation is not just a labor law, but even more importantly, a patient safety issue. It will also help to protect the liability of nurses who put their licenses to practice in jeopardy, every time they are forced to work when they feel too tired to do so safely. Truck drivers, pilots, and postal workers have limits on the amount of hours that they can work. But nurses who bear the responsibility of caring for patients whose lives are in their hands do not. This legislation will change that.

Hospitals that mandate overtime from their direct care professionals should place a warning label at the entrance which says "We cannot guarantee that the care that you receive here will be safe, because we force our nurses to work mandatory overtime." It should not just be the responsibility of policy makers, but of society and the healthcare industry, who must demand that nursing care is safe and that nurses are respected. It is a crime to make the patient the fall guy for the system's failure to provide safe care.

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