Nursing crisis in Maine

Last month’s editorial titled, “Health care’s want ads,” was clearly well intentioned but unfortunately missed the mark. There is no shortage of nurses in Maine. There is, however, a nursing crisis in Maine brought about by nearsighted hospital health care policies that drive nurses into other professions.

Maine has more licensed nurses working at jobs outside nursing than any other New England state. Study after study has shown the same thing, to keep nurses working in nursing, keep them at the bedside, giving care in a safe environment with mandated ratios of nurses to patients.

In the 1980s, the industry created something called “team nursing,” in which health care workers had to divide the care of each patient; one gave medication, another handled treatment, and so on. It was a disaster; patients suffered and nurses left the profession. We face a similar disaster today.

Maine’s current nursing crisis started in 1994 with an industry-wide hiring freeze. The act discouraged people from entering nursing. This resulted in funding being taken away from Maine schools of nursing and decreasing their size. This left the remaining nurses forced to care for too many sick patients. As nurses feared they were doing more harm than good because of these cutthroat policies, even more left the profession.

The current move by a group of health care providers to offer scholarships to solve this crisis sounds good on the surface, but smacks of a cynical publicity stunt. It was the very policies of this group that created the crisis. In the 1980s there were also scholarships offered, and then suddenly they disappeared.

This yo-yo effect created by the health care industry must be stopped by implementing strong nurse-patient ratio legislation. Only Maine legislators can correct the pathetic conditions that patients and nurses must heal in.

Patricia Philbrook is executive director of the Maine State Nurses Association.