Hi Charles: The American Hospital Association backed a a provision in the Senate immigration reform bill that increases the number of foreign nurses who may work in the U.S. The AHA also filed a brief to the Bush NLRB, whose recent ruling is in the subject line of our discussion:
“The charge nurse's role presumes an education and experience that equip him or her to assume a management function. If charge nurses are not perceived as supervisors with managerial prerogatives, the quality of patient care will suffer, hospitals will continue to experience staff shortages and the already significant financial burdens on hospitals will increase. Charge nurses' loyalties will be strained and their already challenging job of ensuring quality care will only become more difficult” <http://www.nlrb.gov/nlrb/about/foia/Oakwood%20KY%20River/7-RC-22141%20(Brief%206).pdf>. Recently, I wrote a piece on elites attacking RNs and other U.S. wage earners: Seth Sandronsky > What is the evidence that nurses are in short supply? That more nurses are needed after the nurses passed legislation requiring the employment of more nurses? Another government created shortage. What a joke. < RNs did not pass the law by themselves like business lobbyists, working in the dark in the corridors of the Capitol. They did it by rallying the public, who saw that the law was in their interest. If there were no law requiring toilet facilities, some apartments would still have outhouses. Even today, landlords don't like laws that they can be fined when their apartments are not rodent-free. For the same reasons, hospitals resist laws requiring at least one RN per so many patients (ratio varies in operating room, post-delivery ward, etc.). Research established that the legislated RN-patient ratios in California are still on the "elastic" portion of the curve, if you will; that is, adding a patient to an RN's workload increases the probability of patient mortality in the next 30 days. But that's an externality for the hospital. When Gov. Schwarzenegger tried to stop implementation of the RN safe staffing law, his administration cited nothing more substantial than newspaper reports blaming the law for nine southern California hospital closures. But eight of them had struggled with financial and operations difficulties long before staffing ratios went into effect on Jan. 1, 2004. There has been a steady stream of hospital closures from at least the late 1980s. There was no spike in closures attributable to the safe staffing law. As for the RN shortage, hospitals are not keen on having the state train more RNs. Instead, they would like to break the profession and have lesser-trained licensed vocational nurses and nurse aides do most of the work at much cheaper wages. One consequence of the state not training RNs is that young people are ready to enter RN programs but there are not enough slots. When they see the government bringing in immigrant RNs while not funding RN programs at local colleges, they are upset, to put it mildly. Charles Andrews
