Gambling With Care

Taylor Marsh at the Huffington Post updated a report today on the nurses’ strike in Las Vegas whereby the nurses at Valley and Desert Springs Hospitals had walked out over the highly important issue of nurse-patient staffing ratios.

Not salary, benefits, or working hours. Nurse-patient staffing ratios.

Marsh mentioned that the nurses, members of the Service Employees International Union, had been in negotiation with David Bussone, Valley Health director for Universal Health Services (based in nearby King of Prussia, Pa.). However, Bussone cut off negotiations to propose a cooling off period, and right after he did so, he locked out the nurses and hired temporary replacements.

Bastard (fortunately, as Marsh noted, Governor-elect Jim Gibbons and Democrats Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid stepped in to intervene, end the lockout and resume negotiations).

This article from Nursing Advocacy explains why the nurse patient staffing issue is so critical, in particular this excerpt:

There is also mounting evidence that improving nurse staffing will significantly improve patient health and actually reduce patient deaths. The recent Massachusetts survey found that nearly one in three nurses were aware of a patient death resulting from nurse short-staffing. And the Aiken study found that when a nurse's patient load is doubled from 4 patients to 8, his patients have a 31% greater chance of dying within a month; this suggests that even the California rules' 8-patient ceiling could result in far more patient deaths than lower ratios, depending on the setting.

So did Bushco actually do something about this?

Believe it or not, they did. As noted from this link (on page 2)...

In August 2002, Congress passed the Nurses Reinvestment Act – a bill that authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to create public service announcements promoting the nursing profession, award grants to nursing schools to help increase enrollment, and create a fast-track nursing faculty training program. The bill also provides scholarships for those who agree to work in nursing shortage areas after graduation, and increases the matching rate for Medicaid nurses’ aid training and competency evaluation programs.

I should emphasize for those unfamiliar with this that the critical issue affecting nurse-patient ratios is the shortage of nurses, and anything that will help with the enrollment of nurses in training is bound to help.

Well, that was 2002. I’ll bet you’re wondering how this is faring now; well, here’s the answer (and get ready for the same tired refrain, by the way)…

The future of nursing received a blow…from President Bush's proposed fiscal year 2006 budget, which calls for a reduction in the overall budget for nurse training and workforce development.

The president's budget provides $150 million for nursing workforce development programs, including the Nurse Reinvestment Act. This figure represents a cut of $1 million from the previous fiscal year's funding, mostly from loan repayment and scholarship programs.

In response to the news, nursing organizations are asking for Congress's help to secure funds for nursing workforce development programs-key initiatives to solving the problem of the workforce shortage.

"With a predicted nursing shortage of more than 275,000 RNs by the year 2010, this is the wrong time to be cutting back our investment in this country's future nurses," said Barbara Blakeney, RN, president of the American Nurses Association (ANA).

I have a particular interest in this issue because it affects two family members, for what it’s worth.

This is why we should contact our elected representatives and urge them to do what they can to appropriate more funding for the Nurse Reinvestment Act. The issue of patient-nurse ratios, as noted above, is quite literally a matter of life and death.