News
The Case for Expanding Nurse-To-Patient Ratios
Massachusetts RN Susan Howe makes the case in the Boston Globe for expanding nurse-to-patient ratios, the Patient Safety Act, to all units in Massachusetts hospitals.
I have been a registered nurse, at the bedside, for 41 years. Over time, I have seen many changes in the health care industry, and not all for the best. Hospitals today are increasingly focused on their bottom lines, often to the detriment of patient care and working conditions for nurses. We used to have time to get to know patients. Now hospitals have as few nurses as possible on each shift in the name of “flexibility” and at the expense of patient outcomes.
For the last 14 years, I have been caring for mothers and newborn babies at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. My fellow nurses and I believe that nurse staffing in the maternity unit is at a crisis point. Between May and November of this year, nurses filed 116 unsafe staffing reports, describing the instances they say they were forced to care for too many patients at once.
Moreover, maternity patients today often need extra care. We see many older mothers now, even first-time mothers in their mid-forties. Their age can lead to risks related to diabetes, high blood pressure, and medications. Plus each assignment for a maternity nurse is actually double — mother and baby. It is not uncommon for nurses to have to care for four or five mothers — meaning at least eight to 10 patients — at once.
Numerous studies show that unsafe staffing hurts patients. Last year, researchers analyzed responses from 26,500 nurses and reviewed medical records for 422,730 patients. Their findings, published in The Lancet, showed that every extra patient added to a nurse’s average workload increases the chance of surgical patients dying within 30 days of admission by 7 percent.
This is why we need the Patient Safety Act. It would establish scientifically supported limits on how many patients a nurse can care for, with flexibility depending on illness or injury. As a maternity nurse, the benefits are easy to see. Hospitals would have to value patient care ahead of profits, and assign only a safe number of mothers and babies to each nurse. We want to provide care to the best of our ability. We need the Patient Safety Act.