OPINION

Thank nurses with safe-staffing legislation

Florence Nightingale said, “The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.” Before Florence Nightingale, doing harm to patients was what hospitals did. She did her most famous work during the Crimean War; a time when what passed for hospitals might have been more dangerous than the battlefield.

We think of hospitals as places of healing and recovery today in large measure because of Florence Nightingale and the generations of nurses who have followed in her kind, caring and professional footsteps. National Nurses Week begins today and ends May 12, Nightingale’s birthday.

Nurses make hospitals safe.

Nurses are warning us hospitals are not as safe as they could be.

Nurses work for hospitals that face increasing pressure to contain the costs of caring for patients. We aren’t necessarily faulting hospitals for that. They are complex organizations caught between competing interests — including the altruistic goal of treating the needy and indigent — and customers who refuse to pay a penny extra for already expensive care and treatment.

But when hospitals trim costs by testing the limits of their nursing staffs, they put patients at risk and add to medical costs. By one estimate, inadequate nurse staffing adds almost $3 billion a year to U.S. medical costs with avoidable extra hospital stays.

In a poll of Michigan nurses, three quarters say staff shortages are putting patients at increased risk of infections, falls, medication errors and preventable deaths and injuries. Other polls suggest tight staffing drives nurses from the profession and adds to our growing nursing shortage.

More than 20 states, including Michigan, have introduced or passed legislation mandating safe staffing levels for hospitals.

The Safe Patient Care Act, House Bill 5013 and Senate Bill 574, would limit the number of patients a single nurse could be assigned, and would limit mandatory overtime for nurses.

The law would not mandate staffing levels. The many variables involved, from patients’ needs to nurses’ abilities, are too complicated to set quotas for every patient in every hospital. Instead, it would set safe minimums and require managers to work with nurses and doctors to ensure that patient needs are always the first priority.