Even before the pandemic, nurses complained of being overwhelmed and overworked. Many told of crowded floors, especially in less-well-off public hospitals, and the need to attend to up to 12 patients at a time—a scenario that left them feeling as if they were not providing the best level of care possible.
Covid-19 ramped up the problem, boosting the patient load and pushing many nurses to take on responsibilities they never had before.
"Staffing is a huge issue," Tanisha Thompson, a registered nurse at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, told Crain's reporter Jennifer Henderson for this week's cover story Staffing Standoff. "The patients are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. They require more and more care, and you really need to have a manageable patient load."
In trying to address the problem, the state Department of Health recently issued a report on the logistics of implementing safe staffing ratios, or the number of patients a nurse can safely attend to during a given shift. The report also predicted the costs associated with adding enough staff to make sure the nurse-to-patient ratio remains low. Researchers found that hospitals would need to hire nearly 25,000 more nurses at an annual cost of up to $2.4 billion. And nursing homes could rack up $2.3 billion in annual costs.
Hospitals point out that their current financial landscape is bleak. After weeks of shutdown, they lost hundreds of millions of dollars by canceling or postponing nonemergency procedures to free up bed space for Covid patients. And New Yorkers aren't exactly rushing back to hospitals and medical offices even as the pandemic winds down, further chipping away at their bottom line. The case with nursing homes is equally dire, as they have been subject to widespread scrutiny about whether they are safe places for our elderly loved ones going forward.
But nurse staffing is an issue that affects all people at some point. Many of us have heard stories about hospital stays in which no one seems to be around to answer questions or comfort family members. And when a nurse finally shows up, he or she is harried and quick to race off again. We rely on nurses to help us in our time of need. But who helps them do their job effectively?
The Health Department's report arrived at an unprecedented time in history. Of course, hospitals will need to be mindful of their finances until the ship is righted again, but adequate staffing for medical professionals needs to remain a top priority. If there is a second wave of Covid-19 that coincides with the flu—and if nurses this year choose to retire during the last quarter, as is usually the case—we will need as many hands on deck as possible to keep fighting this crisis.
As Pat Kane of the New York State Nurses Association noted, hospitals and medical facilities should make recruiting and maintaining an adequate nursing workforce part of their planning conversations for rebounding from this crisis. The health of our state depends on it.
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September 28, 2020 at 06:30PM
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Nurses help us heal—now let's help them do their jobs effectively - Crain's New York Business
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