Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/198081
NewsBriefs:4-8 11/20/08 11:01 PM Page 4 NewsBriefs Texas RNs Saddle Up to Fight for Ratios TEXAS earing up to introduce ratio and nursing rights legislation to Texas in 2009, hundreds of nurses from across the Lone Star state marched and rallied on Nov. 13 in Austin at the state Capitol to show the public, the Legislature, and the hospital industry that they mean business in their fight to safely and humanely care for their patients. "Texas nurses are on a mission for safe hospital staffing," said Joanne Thompson, an RN in the progressive care unit of West Houston Medical Center. "We are stressing that nurses really have power. They don't just have to accept the current conditions." Modeled after California's landmark ratios law, language for the 2009 Texas Hospital Patient Protection Act is being drafted right now and is expected to be introduced when the Texas Legislature convenes in January. It would not only mandate ratios, but guarantee the rights of RNs to advocate for patients and protect whistle-blowers who report unsafe conditions or refuse unsafe work assignments. For Texas RNs, the campaign is coming not a moment too soon. Nurses who attended G 4 REGISTERED NURSE the rally report that they are overwhelmed by their patient loads at work to the point where they worry they are not safely or adequately caring for patients – let alone educating them about caring for themselves after they go home. "We don't even have time to talk to them," lamented Diana Pirzada, a mother baby RN at the main Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. "We're discharging them with not everything they should have gained from their hospital stay." When nurses actually speak up and demand more staffing, they are ignored, says Olga Perez, a labor and delivery RN at Southwest General Hospital in San Antonio. "Management doesn't listen to us when we say we are bombarded by the number of patients," said Perez, who describes the hospital's attitude toward her unit almost like an assembly line for delivering babies. "They say, 'Bring them up, move them out, hurry up.' The Csection rate is very high. We are running around like chickens with our heads cut off. It is endangering our licenses and endangering the patients." A common problem among nurses is an inability to take needed meal and rest breaks because patient loads are so heavy. "I think I can count on two hands the number of real W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G breaks I've had in five years," said Thompson. Perez points out that large number of RNs suffer from urinary tract infections because they are not going to the bathroom when they should. Texas nurses want a state law mandating ratios as already exists in California. Perez this summer decided that she wanted to experience what it was like to practice under ratios, so she picked up her family and drove more than 1,300 miles to work in Los Angeles for a few months. "It was like wonderland. I was like, 'Oh my god, pinch me,'" she said. "There were always plenty of nurses, and they didn't send people home." In Texas she normally cared for up to three laboring patients at the same time or four to five antepartum patients, but said that in California she rarely had more than two at a time. After her shifts, she still had enough energy to take her children to the beach or do some grocery shopping, whereas back home she would crash, exhausted. "We really need ratios here in Texas," said Perez, who dragged along seven coworkers to the rally to expose them to the way things could be. "They came back all pumped up and excited. This is to better our jobs." —staff report NOVEMBER 2008