GUEST COLUMN: Safe patient care shouldn’t be left to the whims of profit-motivated hospitals

How would you feel if you were a hospital nurse’s sixth patient to be seen and you desperately needed help to go to the bathroom or in dire need of pain medication? You’d just have to wait your turn, as awful as that is. These are not just fictitious scenarios but very real situations happening in New Mexico hospitals. Under the New Mexico Patient Safety Act just introduced, they would be illegal.

New Mexico hospitals have to stop paying lip service to their claim that safe patient care is their top priority and start doing what it actually takes to make that a reality. Because hospitals haven’t voluntarily implemented safe staffing ratios, the Legislature must pass the bill sponsored by state Rep. Kathleen Cates and Sen. Leo Jaramillo to force hospitals to do the right thing. The bill requires specific nurse-to-patient staffing ratios that hospitals would have to implement through staffing committees comprised of managers and direct-care nursing staff.

At night in the intensive care unit, it’s not infrequent to be short as many as three nurses. That means an overwhelmed nurse responsible for multiple critically ill patients could delay crucial interventions or miss early signs of sepsis. Under the bill, an ICU nurse could have no more than two patients to care for. If a nurse in the medical-surgery unit is responsible for, say, seven patients, there can be dangerous delays in medication administration. Under the bill, a med-surg nurse could have no more than four patients during a shift.

Hospitals also need to boost staffing for other health care professionals. Hospital physical therapists, for example, are overloaded, causing longer hospital stays for patients to get needed post-surgical therapy or else they’ll have to rely on expensive post-discharge rehab at skilled nursing facilities.

New Mexico hospitals should no longer endanger patients and burn out nurses and other health care workers by trying to get away with chronic understaffing. You can’t have safe patient care without safe staffing levels.

The clear reason why hospitals have refused to hire more health care professionals is to save money. That puts profits over patients. Hospitals are playing with fire. Maximizing profits instead of ensuring that patients get the care they need when they need it is downright despicable.

Do you want to be a nurse’s sixth or even seventh patient if you are immobile and it’s been longer than two hours since you’ve been turned to prevent bedsores, if you’re a diabetic and your blood sugar level is dangerously high requiring insulin, or if you are a psychiatric patient and having an episode requiring immediate intervention?

New Mexico can be on the front lines of compassionate, safe patient care by passing the Patient Safety Act.