Healthy nurses

The state Senate did well Tuesday in strongly supporting legislation to bar mandatory overtime for nurses and in seeing through the flimsy arguments used by opponents. The acute shortage of nurses will not be alleviated by forcing them to work past the point of fatigue. The threat of reprimand must not be allowed to put patients at unnecessary risk. The refusal to put patients at unnecessary risk must not be punishable by loss of license.

The Senate’s sense of timing also was good. Their 21-14 vote for LD 1082 coincided nicely with a new study on nursing burnout. In one of the largest studies ever on the subject, a team of researchers from leading universities here and abroad surveyed more than 43,000 nurses at 711 hospitals in five countries – the United States, Canada, Germany, England and Scotland. The findings, published in the journal Health Affairs, concludes that low pay and crushing workloads are leading not just to a health care problem, but a health care crisis.

Hospital nurses in all five countries overwhelmingly said they were worried about the quality of care being provided to their patients, with nearly half of the nurses in the United States and Canada saying care at their hospitals had declined significantly during just the past year. In every country, nurses say hospital managers have cut staff to save money, forcing registered nurses to care for more and more patients and to add menial tasks, such as delivering food trays, to the skilled duties for which they were trained. Further, in every country, pay for nurses – always low for the level of education required – has not even begun to keep pace with other professions.

But the most distressing finding is that this increasing job dissatisfaction, a trend that has been measured and discussed for decades, is about to bite back. In the United States, the average age of nurses has in-creased from 37 in 1983 to 42 in 1988 and now is approaching 45, a rate of increase unheard of in a field requiring extensive education; young people are not going into nursing and those who already are nurses are changing careers. In just a few years, experts say, this country and Canada, where dissatisfaction is highest, will have a nursing shortage no amount of mandatory overtime can fix.

All of which make the arguments used against this bill counterproductive. This is not a problem that will be solved by appealing, as did Sen. Edward Youngblood, to the Maine work ethic. It is not, as Sen. W. Tom Sawyer said, limited to a dispute between the Maine State Nurses Association and Eastern Maine Medical Center. And if, as the Maine Hospital Association asserts, this protection is not needed because forced overtime is way down a list of incentives used to meet staffing needs, those who are paid far more than nurses for their managerial skills need to review that list and come up with something that actually works.