GILROY
– On Friday, nurses from around the state will tuck away their
bedside manner and put on their activist caps.
GILROY – On Friday, nurses from around the state will tuck away their bedside manner and put on their activist caps.
Several hundred nurses are expected today to march from the state Capitol to the Superior courthouse in Sacramento, where a key hearing will be held on a hospital industry lawsuit.
If successful, the lawsuit could throw out certain nurse-to-patient staffing requirements, such as one nurse per every four patients in emergency rooms. Specifically, the California Healthcare Association wants a judge to reinterpret a provision in a fledgling hospital staffing law that requires certain nurse-to-patient ratios to be met “at all times.”
Nurses from hospitals such as Gilroy-based Saint Louise Regional worry that administrators who are focused on a facility’s bottom line may be trying to make the law too lenient.
“If you don’t meet your nursing ratios at all times, you put nurses in a position where they won’t take their lunches and breaks,” said Donna Fischer, a registered nurse at Saint Louise. “I think the public is better served and safer when you have nurses that are fresh.”
Work kept Fischer from attending the march today, however the veteran nurse sided with the leading nurses advocacy group, the California Nurses Association. The group says a reversal of the new law would disregard “hard won patient protections.
“The law was the result of severely misguided priorities in the healthcare field that put the bottom line before patient safety,” said Chuck Idelson, a spokesman for the California Nurses Association, a group that represents 57,000 nurses across the state.
Meanwhile, hospital advocates say the California Nursing Association is bending the truth and that the law needs clarification so hospitals can abide better.
“They are lying to you. We are not trying to repeal the law, we are just challenging this one aspect of the law. We need to know what ‘at all times’ means,” said Jan Emerson, a vice president with the California Healthcare Association.
Emerson said hospitals have every intention of meeting the nurse-to-patient-ratio laws which went into effect in January. A shortage of nurses in California, however, makes the “at all times” portion of the law undoable.
“Based on our surveys, nine out of 10 hospitals are out of compliance with the law,” Emerson said. “That puts hospitals in all kinds of legal jeopardy.”
The problem, Emerson says, is that under the current wording of the law a hospital is out of compliance whenever a nurse takes a break. Because the law says a staffing ratio of, say, one nurse to four emergency room patients must occur “at all times,” hospitals must bring on an additional nurse even when one nurse takes a five-minute break.
“There aren’t enough nurses in the state of California to make that aspect of the law work,” Emerson said.
According to statistics from the California Board of Registered nurses, 30,288 nurses moved to California over the past three years. However, California lost 27,230 nurses to other states in that same period of time and the rate of nurses graduating from college is not keeping up with population growth.
Given those numbers, Emerson said hospitals want verbiage put into the law that requires a facility to meet staffing ratios at the beginning of shifts, but not “at all times.”
Nursing advocates say that won’t work.
“It’s an argument that stands logic on its head, akin to saying factories may spew poisons into the air or water at night as long as they don’t pollute in daylight hours,” said Deborah Burger, president of the California Nurses Association.
Fischer, the Saint Louise nurse, says Gilroy’s hospital is meeting all required nurse-to-patient staffing ratios presently.
However, Fischer acknowledged it was difficult to meet the ratios in the emergency room, where patient population can fluctuate by the minute.
“We’re still working that out,” Fischer said.
Within Saint Louise’s ER and intensive care unit, Fischer said nurses are being kept on the clock to fill in for nurses on break. The single nurse floats back and forth between the two units so nurses can take regular breaks.
