State lawmakers formally announced on Thursday a series of proposals designed to help nurses in Michigan provide better care for patients.
The bills call for limiting the number of patients hospitals assign to each nurse, reducing mandatory overtime and requiring health care facilities to publicly disclose staffing levels.
Michigan Nurses Association President Jamie Brown says chronic cost-cutting by hospital executives is overwhelming nurses with patients and driving many of them to leave the profession.
“There’s no nursing shortage. The state of Michigan has 50,000 nurses that currently hold an active nursing license that are not practicing at the bedside,” says Brown. “If these laws were to go into effect, it would effectively bring more nurses back to the bedside and there would be plenty of nurses to take care of the patients.”
The pandemic led to burnout among many nurses nationwide, but Brown states the problem goes far beyond difficulties created by COVID-19.
“The patient numbers that the nurses are taking care of has [sic] gotten worse since the pandemic because more nurses are not putting up with the bad working conditions the hospitals are forcing us to work under. And so they’re leaving the profession altogether.”
The Michigan Health and Hospital Association counters that a “one-size-fits-all” approach mandating nurse-to-patient ratios ignores the individual needs of both patients and hospitals.