New York nurses are going to play a key role in forming and implementing safe hospital staffing policies. On June 18, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law that will require all general hospitals in the state to establish clinical staffing committees that will set guidelines for nurse-patient ratios and ancillary staff. The committees will be jointly composed of RNs, LPNs, administrators, and other staff members providing direct patient care. The legislation also creates an advisory commission to evaluate the effectiveness of the staffing committees.
As the governor describes it, “This legislation requires hospitals to create committees that include the very same staff who treat patients on the ground every single day and come up with plans that take their concerns into consideration when allocating staff. We need to make sure nurses and ancillary staff have a voice in their hospitals, and these new requirements will make sure they collaboratively plan for the future.”
According to the new law, nurses and administrators on the committees will be responsible for collaboratively developing clinical staffing plans that specify how many patients are assigned to each nurse and how many ancillary staff are assigned to each unit. The New York State Nurses Association is fully behind the legislation, with NYSNA Executive Director Pat Kane remarking, “COVID-19 devastated hospitals throughout New York State that weren’t adequately prepared to handle a pandemic, and this critical legislation will require them to have plans for the future. We need to protect the vital nurses and doctors who do the important work to keep New Yorkers safe and healthy, and these new committees will include the frontline workers who gave so much to all of us during the pandemic. I thank Governor Cuomo… and look forward to more accountable and prepared hospitals throughout the state.”
The law gives individual facilities more latitude than California’s set nurse-patient ratio law, but the intent is the same: “This law doesn’t state that ratios must be stipulated, but inevitably that’s what it means,” Judy Sheridan-Gonzales, NYSNA president, told Healthcare Dive. NYSNA describes the key points of the law as follows:
For New York hospitals, the hospital staffing committees bill (A108B/S1168A) will:
- Establish clinical staffing committees including 50% frontline nurses and direct care staff that will set annual staffing standards for each unit of a facility. Standards must be expressed in ratios or grids that meet or exceed those set in existing union contracts.
- Make the yearly staffing plans enforceable by the Department of Health, with civil penalties against hospitals that fail to create staffing standards and abide by them, effectively making NYSNA-negotiated staffing ratios state law.
- Require the DOH to establish new minimum staffing standards for ICUs and critical care units that must be incorporated in each hospital’s annual staffing plan.
- Make the staffing data publicly available to staff and patients.
- Create an independent commission to study the effectiveness of the new law in improving patient care and nurse staffing levels and make recommendations for further action to the legislature.
Details on the new law and the NY Governor’s announcement can be found here.
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