Florida needs a law so nurses don’t have too many patients at once | Opinion

When you go to a healthcare facility, like a hospital or ambulatory surgical center, you want to get the best care possible. Much of the care you would receive would most likely come from a nurse or multiple nurses. Nurses are on the front line of delivering and assuring quality care, as they are typically the person that you would interact with most during your time there.

While nurses excel at juggling multiple tasks and patients — they seem to be able to do it all — nurses are only human, and they shouldn’t have to shoulder an unreasonable number of patients, even as the state faces a workforce shortage.

This creates a difficult working environment for our nurses. It is already a demanding field, and when their job is to ensure patient safety, we don’t want to be making it more difficult for them by having them take on too many patients at one time.

Proposed law

This is why I filed Senate Bill 376, the Florida Patient Protection Act, this legislative session to establish and implement a healthy minimum staffing level for direct care registered nurses at healthcare facilities. This legislation will lay out a uniform, minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratio across the state.

By doing so, we will be creating a better work setting for nurses, where they can focus on the core tenet of their job — patient health and safety — rather than having to care for an unmanageable number of patients. Allowing nurses to safely perform their jobs could also, in turn, draw nurses back into the profession.

While this bill is beneficial for nurses — we all want to have a manageable workload where we can deliver the best care (work) possible — it’s also a bill for patients. In addition to outlining a minimum staffing ratio, it also requires that acute care hospitals provide sufficient nursing staff for optimal patient outcomes, staffing based on the health care needs of the patient and whistleblower protections to allow nurses to advocate for their patients.

Patient safety

These measures mean better outcomes for patients, as good, healthy nurse-to-patient ratios are directly correlated with better results, and it allows nurses to be advocates for their patients.

On a larger scale, hospitals also benefit from better outcomes. The better the outcomes in healthcare, the more reimbursements hospitals receive.

When nurses are left to work with an unreasonable nurse-to-patient staffing ratio, outcomes suffer, patients suffer, nurses suffer and hospitals suffer.

SB 376 is a common-sense measure that we can implement to improve all of these and bring patient safety back to the forefront of care.

All of us will probably have to receive care at some point in a healthcare facility — whether it be a hospital or a surgery center — and we all want the best care possible. SB 376 continues to make sure that is possible by providing a safe work environment where nurses can prioritize patient safety.

Sen. Ileana Garcia represents Florida Senate District 36, which includes part of Miami-Dade County.

This story was originally published January 19, 2024 at 10:45 AM.