MASSACHUSETTS NURSE NEWSLETTER :: October 2007

President's Column

Beth Piknick

By Beth Piknick
MNA President

When the state of California first announced that it was going to be establishing a limit on the number of patients a nurse could be required to care for at one time, the hospital industry there had all kinds of dire predictions about what would happen. They claimed that California hospitals would not be able to find nurses to meet safe-staffing standards in the time frame required, and that those same hospitals would collapse and close under the financial burden of implementing the new standards.

Last month I had the opportunity to visit California for a convention with more than 500 staff nurses from across the state. I took the opportunity to grill these nurses—nurses from every type of unit and hospital—about the law, including how it was working and what they thought about it.

What I heard back was a resounding endorsement from frontline nurses.

There is no doubt in their minds that practicing with ratios is a different world from the one before a ratios law was implemented in 2004 and that is because the law works.

Nurses have more time to spend with patients, the quality of care they are delivering has dramatically improved and their patients are more satisfied with their care. This is true of emergency department nurses as well as all other nurses (see related article on page 6).

In fact, none of the dire predictions made by the hospital industry in California, and none of the lies being told to you by hospital administrators here, are true. Here is what actually occurred:

• Not one hospital in California has closed because of the new law.
• According to the California Health and Human Services Agency there has been “no negative impact on the health care system. Our data shows that hospitals have been able to meet the lower ratios. Hospitals had to follow the new rules and discovered they were not as burdensome as they had feared” (Los Angeles Times, 2005).
• The number of actively licensed RNs in California increased by more than 60,000 following enactment of the safe-staffing law, and hospitals were able to easily meet the new standards in time. In fact, the increase in the number of actively licensed RNs in California was almost seven times more than the total number state health officials said would be needed for medical/surgical units (California Board of Registered Nursing Data).
• No hospital has been fined for non-compliance with the law.
• There has been a 60 percent increase in applications for California RN licenses in the years following the enactment of the law (California Board of Registered Registered Nursing Data).
• Nurses also report that there have not been reductions in ancillary staff in the wake of RN staffing limits.

As wehead into the very important hearing this month on our safe staffing bill, we have a strong case to make that Massachusetts—when it comes to safe staffing—should be California dreamin’.