Stress, burnout and retirement are depleting nursing s ranks, including the instructors needed to train their replacements cpbj.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cpbj.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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As health care workers battled the coronavirus in 2020, the pandemic laid bare issues of nurse staffing at the region’s medical systems. What was a point of debate pre-pandemic became front-and-center as patients suffering from COVID-19 inundated hospitals.
Nurses negotiated new contracts at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia, Mercy Fitzgerald and Crozer Health hospitals and nursing facilities in Delaware County, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Langhorne last year and staffing grids were the primary concern of union leadership.
Staffing grids are essentially standards that determine how many patients a nurse can take care of in a given hospital unit. For example, in an intensive care unit there may be a 2-1 patient-to-nurse ratio.
How much can one nurse take on while still providing the best possible care for his or her patients?
Though the issue of safe nurse-to-patient ratios the number of patients a nurse has under direct care has been a hot button issue for the medical community for years. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it elevated to an unprecedented level, nurses say.
They say hospitals have hit, and at some times exceeded, capacity limits with patients carrying a highly communicable disease, testing the limits of nurses abilities.
As more and more nurses are facing burnout and difficulty in providing proper care as they are overwhelmed with far too many patients, workers, unions, legislators, allies and others have called on health systems to ensure that staffing ratios are a guarantee for the nursing community in the commonwealth.
Pa Nurses Association: Graduates Left Waiting As Board Of Nursing Works To Process Licensure Requirements msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Abdeljalil Bounhar / AP
Several statewide nurses unions and Pennsylvania legislators unveiled a series of safe-staffing measures during a virtual press conference Tuesday morning. House Bill 106 and Senate Bill 240, collectively known as the Patient Safety Act, seek to set standards in nurse protections.
“As all of America knows, nurses have been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. And today we are here to say that Pennsylvania needs safe staffing to protect nurses, and in turn protect our patients,” said Tarik Khan, president of the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association.
PSNA is throwing its support behind these bills, as are Nurses of PA (NOPA), the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), and Service Employees International Union Healthcare Pennsylvania (SEIU Healthcare PA).