HPAE Standards Report Supports One Voice Goals: Safe Staffing =’s Safe Patient Care

“Too few caregivers leads to more medical errors, more infections, more complications and more unnecessary patient deaths.” 

So concludes a report to be issued by HPAE concerning the devastating impact short staffing has had on the quality of healthcare in New Jersey’s hospitals and health care facilities. The report makes recommendations that would improve the overall quality of patient care by getting nurses and other health professionals back to the bedside through the creation of real incentives and protections.

The Cost of Costcutting: Unsafe Patient Care
The report focuses on the impact cost cutting has had on the quality of patient care. It cites a recent survey where almost 80% of New Jersey nurses described their facility as short staffed, as well as a 2002 nationwide survey of healthcare professionals that identified inadequate staffing as the number one problem at their workplace. 

The report documents how short staffing has cost hospitals billions in preventable errors and complications, increased lengths of stay and readmission rates, and increased the need to use hiring bonuses and temporary staffing to cover staffing gaps. Yet the added expenditures have failed to stop the decline in the quality of patient care. 

Recommendations that Offer Solutions
However, the purpose of the Standards Report is not simply to document problems but also offer solutions. Those solutions are based upon the knowledge and input of healthcare professionals who actually work at the bedside or staff the departments of hospitals and nursing homes, and who, to quote the report, “know what it takes to create a hospital where healthcare professionals would want to work, and where you would feel comfortable letting your family and friends be patients.”

The report’s main recommendations are as follows:

*Ensure that all hospitals are staffed with adequate numbers of appropriately trained and oriented personnel.

*Provide compensation packages that will reward and retain an experienced workforce.

*Establish health and safety policies and procedures that prevent work-related injuries and illnesses.

Recommendations = One Voice Contract Goals
Problems that are industry wide mean that the solutions will mean little if they are limited to one location or employer. HPAE members will be using the Standards Report’s recommendations as a “template” for their contract proposals at their respective bargaining tables. The need to make the report’s recommendations a reality will be their goal and serve as a blueprint for winning meaningful changes in their local contracts. 

Safe Staffing: It Does Make a Difference Take it from a Nurse!

The demand by HPAE members for safe staffing guarantees - both by law and by contract - is not empty rhetoric. It is a real a necessary standard that health card facilities must meet if patient care is to improve.

Joy Anderson, RN, is an officer of Local 5089, and works at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey on the post partum nursing unit. Joy was a member of her local union’s bargaining team that successfully negotiated safe staffing ratios in her union’s new contract. And for Joy and her colleagues, that protection is already paying off.

“I went to work yesterday, and it was so wonderful,” states Anderson, as quoted in the HPAE Standards Report. “The ratios were in place and I was able to give the kind of care that I have not given in a long time. I got to know my patient’s family’s names, I did some health teaching and counseling. At the end of the day I wasn’t stressed and tired. 

I even looked forward to coming back to work the next day.  I went home knowing that I was able to do a good job.”