I don’t usually cover a whole lot of nurse union articles but I did want to bring this out since this article says 13,000 California nurses prepared to strike starting next week, June 10th and this would be the largest nurses’ strike in US history. There are a huge number of nurses in a variety of locations, both California and in Minnesota that are members of a union, the California Nurses Association and the Minnesota Nurses Association and they’re both member organizations of the National Nurses United organization.
These two groups are really looking for better nurse staffing ratios. In the case of California who have laws for nurse staffing ratios, they want more oversight and more policing of nurse staffing ratios because in California. In some of these hospitals, they’re claiming that there are- there’s no oversight and there’s really no severe penalties for nurse staffing laws to be ignored.And so if you’re going to have a nurse staffing law, you need to make sure that people are having the nurse staffing that they think they’re getting and that’s certainly very important. It certainly lends itself to patient safety and I think that we’re likely to see this.
Nurses as we know are overworked in many situations, have many many patients to take care of, don’t get breaks during a 12-hour shift on a regular basis, really aren’t able to get away and take care of themselves very well, and of course that stress, that fatigue turns into poor patient care at the other end. As the nurses become more tired and more overworked, they are unable to pay attention to those important details and patient safety often suffers.
So it’s something that many organizations are looking at and of course those places that have a unionized system, that union system can sometimes be brought to bear to apply pressure to the facilities. Of course if they don’t have any money to spend or where are they going to pull money from, somebody has to deal without something in order for more nurses to be hired and that’s of course if more nurses are even available because a lot of places still are shorthanded for nursing staff.
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This article has been featured in the news segment in the Nursing Show episode Nurses Review on Allergies and Episode 134
