The governmental objectives of this bill are to ensure that there is a safe nurse to patient ratio in order to ensure proper and efficient patient care. If proper care is taken in the first place it can save much time and money for the hospitals by reducing the amount of mistakes that could be made if there were too few nurses in the facility.
The political influences for this bill are based upon the amount of mistakes that are made in hospitals and facilities by the nursing staff. There are numerous cases in which a nurse makes a mistake perhaps because she has been overworked and then she is taken to court and the hospital can lose much money. Also, because these nurses can make mistakes because there is inadequate staffing, patients are ending up staying in the hospital for much longer than they first anticipated. By putting this bill into effect it will reduce the amount of mistakes made by the nurses.
The potential impact of change is that patients will receive better and more thorough care from their nurse. The nurse will have fewer responsibilities and will therefore have more time to focus their attention on fewer patients, thus resulting in more thorough care. The health care system will also benefit because hospitals and clinics and facilities will have a better reputation of care in their setting and will therefore not have as many cases against them.
3 comments:
A patient to staff ratio based on individual hospitals is a policy that could save a lot of time, money, and potential patient harm. As most of us who have worked in hospitals have seen, adequate nursing staffing is a difficult problem, for nurses and patients alike. In addition, it is evident that the quality of patient care is increased tremendously when the appropriate nurse to patient ratio is maintained. Almost anyone involved in healthcare in some way will be a stakeholder in this issue. Patients will receive more attentive and individualized care, often allowing them to be taught more preventive strategies, or decrease their length of hospitalization. Nurses and staff members who work closely with the nurses will feel less burnt out, and probably have better job satisfaction. Hospitals will save money in the long term by decreasing nursing mistakes related to too many patients, and allowing nurses to provide more effective and preventative care.
Reducing the number of patients a nurse has under his/her care has the potential to greatly reduce preventable mistakes. Nurses who are overloaded with patient assignments are more likely to make mistakes simply because they have too work going on during their shift. They may easily give the wrong medication to the wrong patient causing a lawsuit against the hospital. Hospitals should consider reducing the number of patients assigned to nurses in an effort to provide optimal care to their patients. However, there is a nursing shortage that also needs to be solved in order to provide more nurses to reduce the load of patients.
This bill is extremely important, especially as a nursing student about to enter the healthcare field. Having a smaller number of patients can help the nurse focus and allows them to spend more time with patients, therefore providing better care and making less mistakes. It also provides for better job satisfaction. Over the summer I worked with a nurse preceptor who had worked in California, where they have laws about the number of patients a nurse could have. She had nothing but good things to say about that system, and often complained that she could not give the proper care needed to patients while working in Virginia and getting a large assignment of patients.
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