One reason I am voting yes on Question 1 is my memory of hours spent with my mother, my wife, my children, and other loved ones in hospitals hearing the incessant din of alarms, and even occasional cries and groans of distress.
One reason I am voting yes on Question 1 is my memory of hours spent with my mother, my wife, my children, and other loved ones in hospitals hearing the incessant din of alarms, and even occasional cries and groans of distress.
I’m not talking about war zone triage nor even about the ER, I’m talking about inpatient care in major Boston hospitals (MGH, B&W, etc.). Nurses can’t answer the alarms right away when they’re busy with other patients. Delay addressing medical needs is not good healthcare. The din itself is stressful, antithetical to healing
“First, do no harm” rules doctors and nurses. Not so administrators. The economic forces they bend to are not rules of nature, they result from human inventions that define what a market currently is. Question 1 subordinates the latter to the former. Sure, everybody wants to reduce health care costs. Reducing essential staff is not the way to do it. You get what you pay for.
One recent mailing quotes Donna Glynn, President of the ANA: “Under Question 1’s strict nursing quotas, hospitals will have to close the beds we need to fight our opioid crisis.” Nurses don’t close hospital beds, hospital administrators do. Translated, this is a threat: “If you make us provide more nurses, we’ll stop providing beds for opiate victims.” (And “quota” is a familiar dog whistle. It’s only a change to the staffing guidelines or ‘quotas’ that are in place now.) Other glossy fliers claim that only a demonized “nurse’s union” wants Question 1.
Ask a nurse if having more nurses on the floor would be a bad thing.
Bruce Nevin
Edgartown
Comments
Thank you, Mr. Nevin, for
Linda Fischer West TisburyThank you, Mr. Nevin, for this objective reflection and clarity from personal experience of what Voting YES on 1 is all about. No hospital or ER will ever close the door on our opioid crisis or anyone else for that matter. I have been a staff nurse in the greater Boston area and primarily here, on Martha's Vineyard, for 42 years. You, our community, have seen our faces, over and over, and with our hospital being an area of Critical Access, we will not be closing any beds. Our wait times will not increase. The strict numerical count of patient load to any nurse, is relative; for example, if I have 4 patients and one is of great need, that 'count' will be considered 5 patients. Nurses have been accessing patient assignments every shift, every day, for years. We are a team; we support each other as we take pride in high standard care of our patients. We love and care about what we do. Help us to continue to be as good as we can be in caring for all of you. VOTE YES on 1
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