National Nurses United

RoseAnn DeMoro Executive Director, National Nurses United Ratios at Risk The hospital industry is finding lackeys in labor to destroy safe staffing ratios A nd now a message from Texas nurses on the attempt by another union to destroy ratios: ���We, the NNOC RNs of the Professional Practice Committee at Cypress Fairbanks Hospital (Houston), and the 300 registered nurses we represent in our facility, strongly and vehemently oppose the current attack on California���s safe patient ratio legislation. ���It is well known and documented that safe nurse-to-patient ratios save lives and improve patient outcomes. Suspending ratios while RNs are having their meals and breaks will place patients in harm���s way. ��RNs will have double the number of patients in their care. �� ���Twice as many patients means less RNs at the bedside, resulting in less monitoring of patients��� conditions, less pain control, and less ability to protect seriously ill patients from deteriorating further. ��Putting our patients at risk for the sake of hospital profits is unacceptable and dangerous. �� ���Therefore, we stand in solidarity and fully support our NNU sisters and brothers in California on this critically important issue.��Ratios must stand to allow nurses to care for their patients safely!��� Nicely put. If there is one bedrock issue that unites U.S. nurses from coast to coast, it is safe staffing for their patients. So when a California union official, Dave Regan, president of SEIU/United Healthcare Workers West, teamed up with the California Hospital Association on a scheme to suspend a key portion of the California���s historic ratio law, nurses were fighting mad. Nurses across the country, in fact. Here���s what happened. In May, Regan signed a secret partnership agreement with CHA, the lobbying arm of the hospital industry in California and one of the biggest spenders in California politics which uses its influence to oppose nearly every effort to improve patient care, workplace standards, or worker rights. For example, CHA has successfully lobbied for years to delay state mandates for seismic JUNE 2012 upgrades to prevent hospitals from falling down on patients and staff during a temblor in quake-prone California. The law was passed, and reinforced, after hospitals did in fact collapse in two Southern California earthquakes, killing patients in some hospitals and creating serious structural problems in others. Opposing safe staffing has probably been the CHA���s number-one priority ��� and, for the same reason it has opposed other safety standards. Profits, not patient care, are the prime directive of the hospital executives it represents, who keep CHA afloat with their dues. It���s also the reason why the hospital industry has fiercely fought ratio legislation in other states where nurses for years have sought to emulate the California experience. In California, CHA opposed the ratio law every year before it was enacted, then tried to persuade state regulators to adopt meaninglessly high ratios, then filed a lawsuit on the eve of implementation to overturn the requirement that hospitals be in compliance with the ratio law at all times, and specifically during meal and rest breaks. Rejecting CHA���s suit, Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian ruled that maintaining the minimum ratios at all times, including meal and rest breaks was the only reasonable interpretation of the nurse-topatient��regulation, noting ���[a]ny other interpretation would make the nurse-topatient ratios meaningless.��� With failure after failure, CHA then engaged in subversion, holding workshops for nurse managers on how to evade the letter and spirit of the law. The tactics worked best in hospitals where the nurses did not have a collective voice through the California Nurses Association. Next, CHA persuaded the then weightlifting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend portions of the law. After 107 nurse-led protests, a court ruling that he had acted illegally, and a smack down in the polls, Schwarzenegger backed down. So CHA found another water carrier, in W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G this case Dave Regan. CHA and Regan signed a partnership pact in May. As part of the deal, Regan agreed to do the hospital���s bidding, starting with collaborating with CHA on its dream of overturning the ratios by initially suspending them during meal and rest breaks. Their plan: to find a compliant legislator and then persuade other California unions to remain silent on the issue. This plot failed as well. Nurses across the state protested, and the California Labor Federation refused to help Regan look good in the eyes of his new master, the hospital industry. Within days, thousands of nurses from coast to coast had signed petitions and written letters and website messages to us opposing the attack, along the way telling their own stories about the often poor staffing and other patient care conditions in their hospital. From a Nevada RN: ���We have a ratio agreement with the union in NV of 1:5 and that doesn���t include breaks. So during a nurse���s break we are 1:10, and sometimes even 1:11. Sometimes we are even down two different hallways and when I mentioned that it was unsafe for me to watch my five patients and the nurse on break���s five down a different hallway, I was questioned as to why it was unsafe by management!��� From a Missouri RN: (Our) rehabilitation hospital assigns 7-8 pts or more per RN. They do not use acuity, they only go by numbers. (We have) more medical pts than rehab. Tube feedings IV antibiotics in and out caths every 4 hours. Lucky if you get 30 min for lunch. Never a break. Phone goes off all the time even at lunch with no one to take over for you.��� From a North Carolina RN: ���I remember hearing from my nurse manager, back when I worked in a hospital, that it was important to ���come in under budget.��� Then from someone else I heard that the managers who did got bonuses as incentives ��� we were repeatedly told, despite our reasonable requests for more staff, that we had enough nurses according to the acuity numbers ��� The acuity numbers needed to be tweaked to reflect the real needs of the patients and staff, not the needs of the company to serve the almighty dollar. When will (Continued on page 17) N AT I O N A L N U R S E 11

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