
America's Nurse Staffing Crisis
:
Nurse
Staffing Crisis Making National News
"Medicine needs more nurses"
--Florida Today, FL
"Overworked nurses drive up error rate: U.S. study
is calling for minimum staffing standards at
hospitals"
--Detroit Free Press
Condition Critical: Patients Pay Price for Nursing
Shortage
--CNN: Your Health
Many of America’s hospitals are dangerously short
staffed. Nurses are often forced to work overtime
and asked to deliver care they are not qualified to
provide. In almost all cases of understaffing,
nurses are assigned more patients than they can
safely handle—which can mean missed or incorrect
medication, delays in care, patient accidents or
worse.
Not being able to provide adequate care for patients
has driven hundreds of thousands of qualified nurses
out of nursing. Meanwhile hospitals are seeing an
increase in the number of patients requiring greater
care. This means that fewer nurses are responsible
for a larger population of sicker patients.
This situation cannot continue. The National
Consumers League is supporting a national campaign,
launched by the more than half a million nurses of
the AFL-CIO, to make sure that all hospitals adopt
safe staffing standards.
We have joined this campaign to protect patients. We
want to hear from you. If you have had an experience
that involved nurse staffing in hospitals (positive
or negative) in the last 5 years, please share it
with us.