- According to the American Nurses Association, having a safe nurse-to-patient ratio—usually around one nurse per four or five patients—is critical for proper patient care. Nurses at Ascension facilities, in contrast, are often saddled with twice that number. “[At Ascension, med-surg] nurses always have usually six or seven and sometimes eight or nine [patients],” Marvin Ruckle, an RN at Ascension Via St. Joseph Hospital, says. “When you’ve got more than what should be a reasonable assignment . . . it just sets the nurse up for making a mistake. And it’s not their fault. It’s just being human. And we can only do so many tasks at one time.”
- Short-staffing in hospitals has been an issue for healthcare workers for years, but it was made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. A report by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) found that about 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the pandemic due to stress, burnout, or retirement. The report’s findings indicate that if working conditions do not improve by 2027, almost 900,000 nurses, a fifth of the total number of currently registered nurses, intend to leave the workforce.
- Hospitals across the country lost many of their nurses due to “moral injury,” a term that describes the overwhelming fear, anxiety, guilt, and anger that frontline workers feel when put into life or death situations without the support or resources needed to properly care for themselves and their patients.
- What’s left is an influx of travel nurses, a solution which is both expensive and temporary, and a slew of overworked and overwhelmed resident nurses who do not trust their management and administrators, says Ruckle.
https://progressive.org/latest/it-trickles-down-to-the-patient-nurses-continue-organizing-fitzgerald-20230922/