A proposed Massachusetts law on minimum safe nurse staffing levels is working through the legislature there, but regional hospitals there are not just standing by and letting the measure pass without a fight. A $70,000 radio campaign has been launched to get the public to stop the compromise committee in its tracks.

This is in response to a radio and TV ad campaign run by the Massachusetts Nurses Association in June, supporting the measure. The Massachusetts State legislature will adjourn for the summer this week and supporters of the bill are hoping to push through a compromise between the house and senate versions of the bill before the recess.

Read the whole article here.

Predictably, the hospitals are saying the bill will increase the cost of health care across the board while the nursing union is citing serious patient safety issues involved in unsafe staffing. This is not an issue that is easily resolved since requiring minimum nurse staffing is not the same as actually putting it into practice.

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Check out our interview episode with Zenei Cortez of the California Nurses Association on their nurse staffing law.

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A Complex Problem

Nurse staffing is a complex issue. Hiring and retaining nurses in today’s competitive job marketplace is difficult. Some hospitals are working on methods to hire and retain more nurses and are having some success in the process, but what if they now had to go out and hire 10, 20, or 30 more nurses to fill voids in the schedule created by mandatory staffing levels.

The other side of the staffing issue is where are all of the nurses going to come from? Seriously, if every other story in the news is about plugging hole in the nurse staffing dike, how can you hire more nurses if you don’t have any more nurses to hire? They’ve got to come from somewhere and every statistic I can find says that the schools cannot keep up with the losses from retirement and death in the current nursing staff pool.

So, nurse staffing laws - are they a good idea or a bad idea?

The issue is complex, but if adequate staffing levels are available in the region, then I say that, yes nurse staffing laws can help. We have all seen what happens when businesses are left to police themselves without government oversight of some kind. Relaxed or removed regulation collapsed the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s. De-regulation and lack of effective government auditing created the Enron scandle. The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is another example.

When nurses are overburdened with extra patients, mistakes start to happen. Patient care is ultimately more expensive due to the costly errors that accompany the most common medical errors. Nurse staffing laws are intended to ensure that nurses have the time to provide competent care for their patients, in a safe and non-stressful way.

Just because our industry is health care does not make us immune to greed or the bottom line administrators who will opt to take a chance on patient safety in order to delete one staff position from a department or departments. The for-profit health companies (hospitals and insurers) need some oversight to maintain safe patient staffing.

In a perfect world, each patient would get their own nurse and physician to hold their hand through the illness and recovery process. But we live in a world that is far from perfect. In a time where energy costs are rising and hospitals and businesses everywhere are struggling to maintain a budgetary balance, too often the employees take the hit.

Nurse staffing in the hospital units should not be one of the jobs affected.

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Read the Nursing Show blog article, posted earlier this week, on what one hospital is doing to cope with staffing issues.