On 2 February the federal government formally repealed the minimum staffing rule for nursing homes. It is worth being precise about what that means, because the rule had already been struck down in court and then blocked by Congress. This was the paperwork on a death that happened some time ago. For...
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For the first time since the pandemic, most of the numbers in nursing's annual scoreboard are moving in the right direction. Turnover fell for the third year running. Hospitals added nearly a hundred thousand nurses to their payrolls. Even the time it takes to fill a vacancy shrank, by three whole d...
Read more →The New York Times published a video editorial which spells out the truth about what’s going wrong — terribly wrong — in nursing. And it pulls no punches! We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed. Yes, “America’s nurses are overworked, burned out, and quitting in droves.” Ye...
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We came across a great metaphor about short staffing, finessed the wording, turned it into this image, and shared it on Facebook and Instagram. It was as if we’d opened the floodgates: your response was overwhelming. Almost a million people saw the post, and a torrent of heartbreaking stories and he...
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What if you knew about a problem that makes patients have to stay in hospitals longer, suffer more infections, and make it more likely they’ll need to come back for more treatment? That makes nurses unhappier at their work, and more likely to suffer burnout? That actually makes more patients die? Wh...
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Every day, nurses spend a lot of time on their feet – but it's rare for them to march! The last time nurses took to the streets in a nationally organized protest for better, safer working conditions for themselves and their patients was back in 1995. That year, over 35,000 nurses from around the cou...
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Andrew Gentry/ Fotolia Higher nurse workloads due to inadequate staffing have a direct impact on patient outcomes after surgery, a new study has found. The large-scale study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing showed that higher nurse workloads negatively impacted all patients, but...
Read more →Alexander Raths/ Fotolia California has a strict nurse-to-patient ratio law, but since there haven't really been any penalties for failing to adhere to it, the law has been hard to enforce. A measure to give the department of public health more authority to crack down on hospitals that don't obey th...
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Image courtesy of markhillary via Flickr A study from France has found that a shortage of beds in hospital intensive care units may mean that more patients die. An article from Reuters reports on the study, which focused on 10 hospitals in western France. The researchers found that almost 15% of the...
Read more →A new study that is part of the RN Work Project has shown that state-mandated caps on mandatory nursing overtime has a positive effect on patient safety. The laws effectively reduce overtime hours, which have been shown to reduce fatigue and the problems that come along with it, such as increased mi...
Read more →A survey has found that one way to improve patient care is to improve the work environment for nurses. Staffing levels are also important, but this survey indicated that even just a single incremental increase in how nurses rated their physical work environment resulted in a nearly five times greate...
Read more →Making the workplace better for nurses turns out to not only benefit them, but their patients as well. United Press International reports: Dr. Jennifer Taylor of the Drexel University School of Public Health found the safety climate was associated with both patient and nurse injuries, suggesting pat...
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