***Comment this please***

I don’t know if there exists a topic in nursing that gets more more fired up than nursing staffing and patient ratios. I think because this is something I’ve lived through in my career as a floor nurse. Starting out in a rural hospital in the middle of nowhere, leadership got away with unimaginable methods of staffing. We would often have med/surg nurses float to our floor who refused to care for newborns. Leaderships solution was, “the mom will have a nurse and the baby will have a nurse”. We were permitted 4 couplets (a mom and infant in the room counts as 1). With this strategy I had 8 patients to take care of. I never felt safe working working at that facility and it really put a bad taste in my mouth as far as hospital administration goes. Unfortunately I learned too early in my career that administration really only cares about the bottom line.

With so much of a hospital’s reimbursement tied up with nursing care and patient satisfaction scores it surprises me when hospitals try to staff units with the bare minimum of nurses. When a nurse is spread too thin how are they expected to deliver quality care? How are nurses expected to care for our patient’s safely?