Don’t listen to management posing as bedside nurses. WA hospitals need safe staffing law

Hospital executives are trotting out well-paid managers posing as frontline workers to fool you into opposing a bill that would establish safe staffing standards for Washington hospitals. But take it from actual beside nurses and healthcare workers: We urgently need legislators to pass safe staffing standards for Washington hospitals.

Nurses like me are struggling with a staffing crisis across the state. The safe staffing standards bill proposed in the legislature — House Bill 1868 — would protect healthcare workers from dangerously high patient loads, ensuring we can do our jobs safely and give patients the care they deserve.

It’s also the only way to address the hospital staffing crisis in the long run.

The problems we face aren’t new. For years we’ve warned executives at our hospitals about short staffing, urging them to work with us to ensure manageable, safe patient loads. But hospital executives ignored us, making budget-driven decisions to minimize staff costs and maximize profits, including taking more than $20 million in bonuses for themselves across the state. Then the pandemic hit and put these longstanding issues in a pressure cooker.

For the last two years of this pandemic, my colleagues and I have been at the bedside doing our best to take care of our community, despite being unequipped, unsupported by management and at our breaking points. I’ve watched so many colleagues leave bedside care to quit nursing entirely or become traveler nurses making up to four times as much — including going to work in California, a state with safe staffing standards like those proposed in HB 1868.

This crisis has only gotten worse. In a December poll of Washington healthcare workers, half said they were likely to quit healthcare within the next few years. Of those likely to quit, 71% said short staffing was among the biggest reasons. The burnout has only been compounded as hospitals have resisted our calls for measures that could help retain qualified staff, while paying travel nurses up to $10,000 a week. Imagine how you would feel if your boss was making you do the work of three employees, refused to pay you more, implement safety measures, or respect your breaks, then paid a contract worker four times as much as you to do the same job. Wouldn’t you think about quitting too?

And that is why you’ll hear chief nursing officers carrying water for hospital executives’ arguments. They’re usually not the ones getting the midnight texts saying we’re 10 nurses short in the ICU and asking if anyone can come in on their day off; they’re most often the ones sending them.

The only way to address this crisis in the long-term is to ensure hospitals follow safe staffing standards. Claims that there simply are not more nurses to hire are completely false. According to state and federal data compiled by the Washington State Nurses Association, there are 120,069 active licensed nurses in Washington but only 59,300 actively employed in all healthcare settings, including hospitals.

In short, there’s not a shortage of healthcare workers. There’s a shortage of healthcare workers willing to work under these conditions.

So don’t believe misleading scare tactics that safe staffing standards will make it harder for you to receive care; the argument that more healthcare workers will mean less care or delayed care doesn’t even make sense. But beyond that, these claims effectively describe the reality we’re facing now.

On the contrary, more than 30 years of research shows that when nurses have safe patient loads, patients leave the hospital faster with better outcomes. In California, safe staffing standards have increased nurse staffing levels and decreased burnout, and at least one study found lower patient mortality as a result.

We can’t continue like this. Nurses are leaving the profession too fast to replace them. You can graduate all the new nurses and healthcare workers you want, but if they burn out and leave after a few years, we’ll be stuck in this perpetual crisis and patients won’t get the care they need.

Please listen to nurses like me and other healthcare workers. We need lawmakers in Olympia to pass the safe staffing standards we’ve asked for, to make our jobs safer and manageable and ensure our patients — you — get the timely and quality care they need.

Linda Burbank is a registered nurse in the acute care cardiac unit at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, where she has worked for 21 years.

This story was originally published February 14, 2022 at 5:00 AM.