On Wednesday of this week, June 4, the MNA announced that a
survey of bedside nurses in Massachusetts had found that one in four (23%)
“report patient deaths directly attributable to having too many patients to
care for.”
In a press release, the MNA said the survey respondents
“were all nurses currently working in Massachusetts hospitals randomly selected
from a complete file of the 92,000 nurses registered with the Massachusetts
Board of Registration in Nursing.” (The total
number of respondents was not disclosed.)
Further, the release said that, according to the firm that
conducted the survey, the results “can be assumed to be representative” of the
92,000 nurses to within 7 percentage points, plus or minus, “at a 95% confidence level.” (Bold facing added.) Translation:
If you could somehow ask each of the 92,000 nurses if they
were personally aware of a patient having died because there weren’t enough
nurses on hand to care for all of the patients who needed care, you could be confident
that between 16% and 30% of them would answer in the affirmative. Sixteen percent of 92,000 is 14,720. Thirty percent is 27,600.
This is a startling assertion.
Assuming just one witnessed patient death per surveyed
nurse, the MNA is implying that at least 14,720 patients have died because not
enough nurses were assigned to care for them.
The Massachusetts Hospital Association quickly challenged
the findings. In a statement to the
State House News Service, the MHA said:
“It (the survey) is not credible, and it is troubling that
the union, to advance its political agenda, would issue such unsubstantiated
safety claims that run counter to the publicly available data and
evidence. No federal and state
government agency that routinely monitors and licenses hospitals for
performance or quality of care has raised concerns on issues that the union
makes claims about. There is no evidence
to support the union’s claims regarding patient safety. (Bold facing added.) But there is evidence that the quality of
patient care in Massachusetts hospitals is of high quality.”
The survey comes amid an intensifying effort by the MNA to
get a law enacted that would allow the Department of Public Health to establish
mandatory nurse-to-patient staffing ratios.
A co-sponsor of the bill in the House, registered nurse and
state representative Denise Garlick of Needham, said on Wednesday, “There’s an
old adage in medicine that says: ‘If you don’t listen to nurses, you will not
hear the patients.’ If we listen to the
registered nurses of this Commonwealth and what they are saying, we will hear
the sound of patients who are suffering needless complications, medical errors
and readmissions, and the silence of those who cannot speak at all.”
State Senator Marc Pacheco of Taunton, who’s the lead
sponsor of the bill in the upper branch, said, “Just think about the liability
issues that are out there for all these hospitals.”
On a parallel track, the MNA is working to put a nursing
ratio question on the November, 2014, statewide ballot. If approved by the voters, the measure would
limit the number of patients that could be assigned to a registered nurse in a
hospital and certain other health care facilities.
It will be interesting to see how aggressively and how extensively hospitals (and
others) question the survey results going forward.
Will they, for example, ask state and federal health care regulators to
furnish the figures on how many registered nurses in Massachusetts have filed
formal complaints to the effect that a patient died on her/his watch because of
inadequate staffing?
If those figures were made available, I’d be surprised if
the total was anywhere near 14,720.
Then the question would be: How come the nurses did not come
forward?
A full summary of the
survey may be found on the MNA’s web site by going to:
http://www.massnurses.org/news-and-events/p/openItem/8928
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