Hospital Nurses ? - What is your patient/nurse ratio?

[Poohlovr]

Under what grounds? When we are hired, we acknowledge that we may be required to work mandated hours as a condition of our employment. Even the state legislature has written laws stating that it is legal to require us to work over in the event of a staffing shortage (I kid you not--they addressed the issue and made it a law that hospitals can require it as a cindition of employment).

Our state board has refused to enter that fray; they only will say that refusal to stay does not constitute abandonment (as long as we communicate the need to leave to our supervisor and make every "practical and prudent" effort to find someone to assume care of our patients). The board further wrote, in their opinion statement, that we are an "at will" employee in this state and they cannot intervene if we are fired for refusal to stay.

No, the hospitals covered themselves (legally) quite nicely with this issue.

Apparently, your state government is not as concerned as ours with our (lack of) working conditions. They were kind enough to limit the number of hours we can be made to work in one day and the number of hours we must be allowed off between shifts.

 

[Disney Doll]

I'm not sure why the with regard to the rules of the nursing state board here in CT.

Last I checked, the rules were that our place of employment could not mandate us to stay overtime. It would seem to me that mandating OT would make your working conditions worse...a bunch of tired nurses running around are bound to make mistakes.

The onus needs to be put where it needs to be put...on the administrators of the hospital, who are ulimately responsible for what goes on in the institution. For example, there is a push to "transform" med/surg nursing at the bedside in my place. There is some program they are following that they got from some company, which is fine. The first step in the program is to ask nurses to think outside the box in answering 5 different questions that they gave us as "jumping off" points. Of course, my supervisor (who I generally love) is in there looking at everyone's repsonses and getting mad at some of the things people have written, as if they are personal insults to her. I finally told her that if she continued to make disparaging comments out loud about the things people wrote that she was going to ruin the process. People were going to be afraid to be honest for fear of retribution. We understand that not everything we write down is going to happen. But they are asking us to "think outside the box" so that's what we are doing. I am starting to think it's going to be another exercise where administration isn't hearing what they want to hear, so we will be ignored.