Vote NO on Question #1

I am writing in regards to Ballot Question #1 for our November 6, 2018 State Election.

Those who do not work in the medical field have expressed confusion on this issue and I felt it was important to share my experience regarding mandated nurse to patient staffing ratios.

I became a Registered Nurse 13 years ago and have worked the majority of my career in a very busy Boston Emergency Department. In 2009, I spent 3 months working in an Emergency Department in California as a travel nurse where mandated staffing laws were in place. Although it would seem to many that mandated nurse to patient ratios would be helpful in providing safe patient care, this experience showed me that this law is not the answer.

Working night shifts, I was assigned no more than 4 patients at any given time. The problem with this is that no two patients are alike. They all have very different needs with highly variable levels of complexity that can not be measured by any standardized tool. As a nurse I have developed the ability to respond to the needs of each of my sick or injured patients using my professional judgement. When that was taken away it was very challenging. I would often have patients who were stable and waiting for admissions or test results which meant that I could certainly spend this time providing care to someone else in need. The problem was that the law said that I was not allowed to help another patient, even if I was perfectly capable of doing so.

The other scenario I found myself in was even more frightening. I was assigned as the triage nurse when there were often more than 20 sick or injured people in need of medical care in the waiting room. It didn’t matter if the nurses within the department had the ability to care for them because the law said that they couldn’t. This was very scary.

Nurses have an incredible ability to prioritize, work together and make decisions based on the ever changing needs of the department and the patients within it. Please don’t take that away from us. If it were your family member in the waiting room suffering, you would want me to use all of the skills I have developed as a nurse and help them in any way I could. I want this too.

A rigid law like this is not safe, and it is not the answer for Massachusetts. Please vote NO on Question 1.