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Now is the time to RISE UP! for Safe Patient Care legislation. We’re moving all of Michigan to establish a contract between Michigan citizens and Michigan hospitals for safe patient care.
HB 4339 status as of July 25, 2007
On Tuesday, July 24, the House of Representatives Labor Committee delayed taking a vote on HB 4339 (Safe Patient Care legislation) due to the excused absences of some of the Committee members. The vote will be held at a future date. Meanwhile, the lobbyists for the Michigan Hospital Association have been hard at work attempting to sway legislators to vote down the bill. The best way we can respond is to have all Michigan nurses and their friends, family and neighbors RISE UP and flood the offices of the legislators with phone calls, e-mails and visits.
To find phone and office location information for your Representative, click here. For information about HB 4339 that you can use in conversations with your Representative and an e-letter than can be sent, click here.
MNA extends its appreciation to everyone who took the time to RISE UP and contacted their legislators and/or traveled to Lansing to appear at the Labor Committee hearings. It is making a difference, but more needs to be done.
What you can do to help
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Contact the members of the House of Representatives Labor Committee. The Committee members and a sample message that can be e-mailed directly to them are shown below.
Members of the House Labor Committee
Sample Message
Registered nurses who are practicing at the bedside are focused on providing quality care. However, to do so, there must be adequate staffing and the nurses must not be at the point of fatigue. HB 4339 will save patients and money. Please support HB 4339 by voting for it in the Labor Committee and on to the House for a vote.
- Send an e-mail to your Representative by visiting www.minurses.org and clicking on “Safe Patient Care.”
- Call or visit your Representative’s office to request their support of HB 4339.
- Forward the link for the “Safe Patient Care” webpage to everyone in your e-mail address book with a note asking them to send an e-mail to their legislators.
- Keep a close eye on HB 4339 by bookmarking and visiting this webpage frequently
Talking points
- The Safe Patient Care legislation calls for minimum staffing ratios. Each hospital is responsible for developing and implementing its own staffing plan.
- Increasing nurse staffing levels will save patient lives and money
- Improving workplace conditions for nurses will:
- Minimize nurses from leaving the hospital bedside or not practicing at all
- Help retain nurses working in hospitals and reduce a national shortage of nurses
- Improve recruitment of nurses to the bedside
What legislators are asking
Members of the House Labor Committee were interested in hearing information about:
The nursing shortage in Michigan
The Michigan Department of Labor & Economic Growth estimates that by 2010,
Michigan demand will exceed supply by 7,000 nurses; by 2015, Michigan will need 18,000
more nurses than it will have. Source: The Nursing Agenda for Michigan: 2005-2010
Nurse burnout
A research project compiled by the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 found these results:
For each additional patient assigned to a nurse:
30-day patient mortality increases by 7%,
failure-to rescue rates increase by 7%,
the odds of nursing job dissatisfaction increase by 15% and
the odds of nurse burnout increase by 23%.
When nurses had eight patients instead of four, their patients had a 31% higher chance of dying within 30 days of admission.
Forty-three percent of the nurses surveyed were burned out and emotionally exhausted. Nurses who were burned out were 4 times as likely to report that they were leaving their jobs in the next year.
(Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality, Nurse Burnout, and Job Dissatisfaction, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 2002)
Mandatory overtime
Exhausted nurses could be impaired. Research shows that 19 hours of wakefulness decreases reaction times and the speed of mental processes to the equivalent of a person having a blood alcohol level of 0.05 (The Journal Nature, 1997).
Cost to hospitals
Improving Registered Nurse staffing is a sound financial investment and has no significant impact on a hospital’s profit margin (Journal of Healthcare Finance, Summer 2003: Nurse Staffing, Quality, and Financial Performance)
Minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios
A key point to make in any discussion with legislators is that the Safe Patient Care legislation calls for minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. It then becomes the responsibility of the hospitals to develop and implement a staffing plan that suits their respective needs. There is some confusion between HB 4339 and the passed-into-law California staffing ratios legislation, which calls for exact staffing ratio numbers rather than minimum levels.
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