Nurse Staffing Crisis
Making National News
"Medicine needs more nurses"
--Florida Today, FL
"Overworked nurses drive up error rate: U.S. study
is calling for minimum staffing standards at hospitals"
--Detroit Free Press
Condition Critical: Patients Pay Price for Nursing
Shortage
--CNN: Your Health
Many of America’s hospitals are dangerously short
staffed. Nurses are often forced to work overtime and
asked to deliver care they are not qualified to provide.
In almost all cases of understaffing, nurses are
assigned more patients than they can safely handle—which
can mean missed or incorrect medication, delays in care,
patient accidents or worse.
Not being able to provide
adequate care for patients has driven hundreds of
thousands of qualified nurses out of nursing. Meanwhile
hospitals are seeing an increase in the number of
patients requiring greater care. This means that fewer
nurses are responsible for a larger population of sicker
patients.
This situation cannot continue. The
National Consumers League is supporting a national
campaign, launched by the more than half a million
nurses of the AFL-CIO, to make sure that all hospitals
adopt safe staffing standards.
We have joined this
campaign to protect patients. We want to hear from you.
If you have had an experience that involved nurse
staffing in hospitals (positive or negative) in the last
5 years, please share it with us.
