More Wanting State Mandated Nursing Staff:Patient Ratios

“Ratios undercut the skills, knowledge and experience of nursing professionals. Ratios are inflexible numbers that do not take into account individual patients’ needs and different levels of acuity and complexity among patients.“  **

A joint statement issued by:
The Arizona Hospital & Healthcare Association
Arizona Organization of Nurse Executives
Arizona Nurses Association
(Read full article here.)

Here’s another state’s staff-nursing population (Arizona, this time;  Massachusetts, last time) requesting their government mandate nurse:patient staffing ratios.

And, in opposition, is the hospital-funded, full-time professional lobbyist organization, the senior-most, highest-paid professional nurses in supervisory positions over the nursing labor force in hospital settings, and in a surprise appearance, the state’s own professional nursing organization.  (At least in Massachusetts, their professional nursing organization stood with their clinical care-providing professionals.)

** What?!  Is this a script??  Because, well, uhhhh it sounds a little familiar…

Ok, so if our highest paid nursing professionals are testifying to political law-makers that mandated staffing ratios are harmful to the practice of professional nursing and therefore, to the care of patients, why can I not find any nursing research to support them?  I’m not saying it is not out there – just that I cannot find it.

Please, if you have the references, post them in the comments section below because I assure you, I am not the only person questioning.  …and, make sure they’re good ones because we’ll all be checking them.

I can however find plenty of fodder for the other side – including this little gem completed by and peer-reviewed by and distributed by our own Nursing Honor Society, Sigma Theta Tau:

Greater nurse dose has been associated with decreases in patient mortality, morbidity, and healthcare costs.

Brooten, D., Youngblut, JM.  Nurse Dose as a Concept. Journal of Nursing Scholarship. 38(1):94-99, March 2006.

I love the ‘concept’ of Nurses being evaluated as a patient prescription (‘dose’) for care, btw!  It just seems very obvious.  But, then again, I am a nurse that believes that to my core.

When applied correctly, Nurses are a patient’s best medicine.

Looking forward to your thoughts…

the Muse, RN