TRAVERSE CITY — The Michigan Nurses’ Association and some Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation meant to tackle the nursing shortage and keep patients safer.
Hearings were supposed to be heard Tuesday surrounding the proposed legislation known as the Safe Patient Care Act, but those hearings were postponed.
The legislation would set limits on the nurse to patient ratio, curb excessive mandatory overtime, and require hospitals to be more transparent and disclose their nurse to patient ratios.
Nikia Parker is an emergency room RN. She’s been an RN for the past 18 years. Parker said the narrative about the nursing shortage isn’t totally accurate.
“There’s somewhere around 150,000 nurses that are licensed to practice in the state of Michigan. About 50,000 of them are not practicing in the state of Michigan. That’s 50,000 nurses that you could have working but aren’t. So it’s not a nursing shortage. It’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in the environment that has been created by the current health care system,” said Parker.
Up until a year ago, Parker was working full time but pulled back to working just one day a week as an RN because of the work environment.
“Nursing is my passion but the environment was hurting me. The job that I love so much was causing me a lot of pain and moral injury because we are consistently being asked to do more and more with less and less,” said Parker.
Parker said over the years, the job hasn’t changed but the workload has.
“You have too many patients and too many responsibilities and that you can’t do your job well,” said Parker.
According to Parker, it’s simple math, decreasing the number of patients you have to care for increases the quality of that care.
She said she was excited to hear that lawmakers were holding hearings on the issue until she heard they were no longer happening.
“I was devastated, actually, I was really upset because our voices are the only way that we can be heard by politicians that are making crucial decisions that impact our lives, our patients lives, every single day. And I felt like this hearing was a chance to be heard,” said Parker.
California passed similar legislation decades ago, attracting many of Parker’s nursing colleagues in recent years.
“They like to call California the utopia. And it’s because when you show up to work, you know that your patients are going to get everything that you need, that you’re going to be able to do the highest quality of care for your patients,” said Parker.
Corewell Health and Munson Healthcare both said they appreciate the intent but the bill would impact patients’ access to care.
Tamara J. Putney, the Chief Nursing Officer of Munson Medical Center said it would mean less access for patients.
“We have 161 full time hour and vacancies right now. If we to meet the demands of this legislation, we would have to hire over 400 more. So we would be forced to take beds off line, about 100 beds offline. That would affect eight hospitals and 25 different units,” said Putney.
