Nurses in Maine are asking for Gov. Janet Mill's support for a bill limiting the number of patients a nurse is responsible for during a shift.
LD 1939, otherwise known as "The Maine Quality Care Act," would set an enforceable nurse-to-patient ratio in Maine’s acute-care hospitals. Advocates say having an enforceable ratio would lead to a higher standard of care for patients.
"When a nurse has too many patients, we spend less time with each one," said Julianna Hansen, a registered nurse at the R6 unit at Maine Medical Center in Portland. "We’re more likely to miss warning signs for deteriorating conditions. When nurses are too busy and don’t catch those early warning signs, bad things can happen. Patients can go septic, patients can die."
Beyond the quality of care, advocates point to the effects felt by nurses. Organizations like the American Nurse Association emphasize that better staffing ratios lead to better satisfaction amongst nurses. The issue is particularly relevant as nurses express their feelings of burnout caused by the work conditions.
Emma Cooper, a registered nurse in postpartum care at Maine Med, said the current staffing system stretches nurses thin, making them feel unable to provide patients with proper care.
"It is the deep devastating pain of being a person who cares [and] who knows what needs to happen for [a patient], and being unable to do it simply because you are too busy with other patients," Cooper said.
Cooper's mother, State Sen. Stacy Brenner of Cumberland, sponsored the original bill. "It’s causing nurses like myself to not only leave the bedside, but to also be saddled with unimaginable trauma and distress causing things like depression and PTSD," she said.
But not everyone in Maine's medical field agrees with mandatory nurse staffing ratios. The Maine Hospital Association which represents 36 hospitals in Maine publicly opposes the bill. Maine Medical Center, the state's only Level 1 Trauma Center, believes a hard ratio limit would result in hospitals turning away their patients.
"Patients will come in [and] we’ll have to transfer them elsewhere, because we have a ratio bill that won’t allow us to accommodate patients as we accommodate them now," said Sharon Baughman, the chief nursing officer at MaineHealth, Maine Medical's parent company. "We feel like we do not need the legislature to help us establish how we care for our patients. This is going to affect access to care for sure."
Maine would be the third state to pass patient ratio laws after California and Massachusetts. Laws in five states require hospitals to report staffing ratios to the state's Department of Health. The state Senate approved the Maine Quality Care Act in late March and the bill is now in the House pending approval.
