It is with a heart full of grieve that I write to express my concern on the staffing of nurses in our hospitals. Most hospitals, if not all, implement unsafe nurse staffing and as a result, nurses are being overworked. Overworking our nurses not only threaten patients’ health and safety but can equally lead to pressures being put on nurses which damps their ability to provide safe care. Also, because of inadequate staffing, nurse-patient ratios are high, which often results in patient interventions being delayed. I was recently hospitalized for injury related to unsafe staffing. I am 25 weeks pregnant and works in a mental health unit, where high acuity and violent patients are encountered on regular basis.
Last week, I was scheduled to work alone with one mental health tech on the floor. The unit census was 12 and calls for two nurses and two techs. Though I objected to the schedule, I had no option as the nursing office said they received a lot of call-ins and were short of staff. In the middle of the night, one of our patients became violent, was shouting and going from room to room waking up other patients. We tried to redirect him but he became more violent. Though we called code gray immediately we saw the escalation of behavior, it took some time before our security team came up on the sixth floor. I was coming out with an IM injection that will help calm him down when he broke through the nurses’ station and hit me several times on the stomach. I was so lucky the security came at that time because he was aiming at my syringe. He was immediately taken to seclusion room and I was rushed to the medical floor where I and my baby were monitored for over 24 hours.
This incident triggered a lot of issues. Because I was taken to the hospital, the nursing officer had to stay back on the floor she is not familiar with. I could not work the next day and this led to more shortage of nurses. One of our patients who was suddenly awoken by the commotion fell and injured his hip, he was also taken to the medical floor and stayed there for a few days. The nursing office tried to manage the shortage of nurses the next day and resorted in mandatory overtime, a dangerous staffing practice. All these would have been prevented if an appropriate number of nurses were on duty that fateful night. I am surprised that Michigan is not one of the states that have laws and regulations that address nurse staffing in hospitals. Hospitals within the state can make up their staff matrix as they deem necessary.
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We need a law that will mandate hospitals to adopt a safe staffing matrix. Also, the government needs to impose a strict mandatory staffing ratio in the hospitals. If hospitals are made to operate with stricter nurse-patient ratios, patients will be satisfied with the quality of care they receive, the work environment will be safe for both nurses and their patients and nurses will not feel fatigued at the end of their shift. Thank you for your time and attention to this issue. I hope to see changes in our hospital staffing very soon.
