Hospitals throughout the country may be launching a wide variety of initiatives to attract and retain nurses and build future pipelines, but creating standards for safe staffing — including minimum nurse-to-patient ratios — is the top priority when it comes to shoring up healthcare facility nursing departments, according to a July 13 American Nurses Association news release.
Implementing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios is a critical piece of the organization's platform, but not the only issue the ANA is fighting for, President Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, PhD, RN, said in the release. It's been almost a month since close to 400 ANA members traveled to Capitol Hill to make sure their position on safety and nursing ratios was seen and heard by lawmakers loud and clear.
"ANA's goal is to empower nurses and position them for success. Embracing setting specific ratios for nurses should be viewed as only one piece of a much larger solution," Dr. Mensik Kennedy said in the release. "We're still working to address other longstanding workforce challenges that have dramatically worsened the nurses staffing crisis such as burnout, workplace violence, mandatory overtime and barriers to full practice authority."
ANA supports minimum nurse-to-patient ratios based on "patient acuity, intensity of the unit practice setting and nurses' competency among other variables."
Unsafe staffing levels have been shown to negatively affect the well-being of nurses and patient outcomes. The American Nurses Foundation’s national workplace survey of nurses showed that one-third of nurses (31 percent) work far beyond their scheduled shifts in favor of prioritizing patient care.
According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, one-quarter to 50 percent of nurses surveyed said that "a few times a week" or "every day" they feel emotionally drained (50.8 percent), used up (56.4 percent), fatigued (49.7 percent), burned out (45.1 percent), or at the end of the rope (29.4 percent).