California nurses are celebrating today, June 1, the historic implementation of long-awaited safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in the state’s acute psychiatric hospitals (APH) that should dramatically improve the care behavioral health patients receive and that RNs can provide.
As California struggles with record infections, hospitalizations and deaths, it’s hard to imagine that hospital industry executives, with the cooperation of state regulators, would come up with a plan to make conditions worse. Sadly, they have.
Many Americans may be surprised to know that California is the only state in the country with mandatory limits on the number of patients a nurse can be assigned at one time. Now nurses across the country are pushing for national legislation.
