Massachusetts considering patients-per-nurse limits; nurses claim staffing levels can affect patient safety.

Publication: HealthCare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement

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Depending on who you ask, the state of Massachusetts is either: a) on the verge of; or b) seriously considering following California's lead and limiting the number of patients who can be assigned to nurses. Potential legislation has been working its way, in a series of fits and starts, through the state legislature.

The sooner, the better, says Julie Pinkham, RN, MS, executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), a strong proponent of such limits, who says it has been clearly demonstrated that assigning too many patients to nurses can have a direct impact on patient safety.

"Every piece of research we have seen says that the number of patients a nurse has is directly related to morbidity and mortality," she says. "Linda Aiken was the first one to quantify that." (Aiken's article in the October 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association found that "in hospitals with high patient-to-nurse ratios, surgical patients experience higher risk-adjusted 30-day mortality and failure-to-rescue rates, and nurses are more likely to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction." (1)) "This research validated what nurses have been saying to us."

Pinkham adds that "another paper by Jack Needleman found a direct correlation between...

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