National Nurses United

NewsBriefs.REV_June REV 8/20/10 4:36 PM Page 9 Gulfport city councilman Sam Henderson and RN Gwen Collins Florida RNs Take Local Strategy with Ratios FLORIDA wen collins, rn, remembers sitting down and crying at the end of one of her first shifts as a traveling nurse in an Orlando hospital. She had been assigned nine patients and pressured to take a tenth, and she knew that the workload was too heavy for her to provide safe care. Though Collins ended up refusing the additional assignment, that experience and others like it convinced her that Florida nurses couldn't rely on hospital administrators to staff safely. They needed a law that would protect them and their patients. This summer, in venues from city council meetings to grocery store parking lots, Florida RNs have adopted a local strategy in their campaign for that law, the Florida Hospital Patient Protection Act. "We're trying to get the public knowledgeable about the situation in hospitals," said Collins, a member of National Nurses Organizing Committee Florida, which is leading the campaign. "We're letting them know how important it is for them as potential future patients to keep our hospitals safe, our patients safe, and our nurses happy." Opposition from the hospital industry helped stall the bill, which would mandate G J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 specific minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals, in the previous legislative session. But nurses are undaunted. They've put together a pledge card that Floridians can sign in support of the bill, and hope to gather at least 7,000 signatures from concerned state residents. The cards read simply: "I am, have been, or will be a patient and I support the Florida Hospital Patient Protection Act." On July 20, Collins addressed the city council in her hometown of Gulfport, asking members to endorse the law and urge their state representatives to support it. She pointed to data showing that in California, where nurse-to-patient ratios are enshrined in state law, patients die at a lower rate than in comparable states. "The hospital nurses in California care for fewer patients than in other states and mortality is lower," Collins said. "One has to ask, why should we not save lives in Florida as well?" Council members responded favorably and set a date to continue discussing the issue. The hearing in Gulfport is just one part of a broader push to pass resolutions in support of safe staffing in local jurisdictions around the state in advance of next year's legislative session. Nurses are also meeting with community organizations, like the Florida Alliance of Retired AmeriW 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 cans, and plan to speak at the August meeting of the League of Cities, a consortium of local governments. Tina Bauer, a longtime nurse in St. Petersburg, is lobbying her city council to support the bill. "I have been a nurse for 33 years and I've watched our profession go downhill because of staffing problems," she said. "So I feel pretty strongly about this issue." While nursing has never been an easy job, RNs report that understaffing in Florida hospitals, combined with an elderly population that suffers from a variety of health problems, can make working conditions particularly difficult compared to other states. "At my hospital, we have many patients in medical-surgical units that are on ventilators and have multiple organ problems," said Barbara Rivera, an RN in the St. Petersburg area. A typical staffing ratio in that unit is one nurse to seven patients, she said; ICU nurses can care for up to three patients at a time. NNOC recently collected incident reports from 46 Florida hospitals and found that an overwhelming majority of adverse events were caused by understaffing. "It's out of control in Florida hospitals; it's really abusive," said Cheryl Lecher, another St. Petersburg RN. Lecher said that even the traveling nurse agency she works for has supported the nurses' campaign, inviting her to give a seminar to recruiters about why hospital staffing ratios are important. The issue is complicated, however, by a competing bill in the legislature supported by the Florida Nurses Association. Unlike the NNOC-Florida bill, it does not mandate specific staffing ratios and does not include any enforcement mechanism. RNs said such a law would be insufficient. As nurses prepare for hearings and canvassing across the state, some said they are finding that the experience of working together as staff nurses to influence policy can be its own reward. "Working with NNOC has gotten me politically active and given me a flame that I had lost," said Collins. "It helped me realize that I'm not just here as a doormat and I can actually work to make things better. Nursing went back to being a profession, instead of just a job." —Felicia Mello N AT I O N A L N U R S E 9

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