Landmark safe-staffing mandate marks Buffalo Hospital Nurses' new pacts

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. The hospital in Oak Ridge, TN

used to have, probably still does, a 4:1 patient:nurse ratio on its medical floors back when I lived in Tennessee. It was the preferred hospital for nurses who worked agency. It was also the only unionized hospital in east Tennessee and may have been the only one in the whole state.

I remember when Schwarzenegger was governor of California and was trying to get the staffing limit there raised from 5:1 to 6:1. Then he got sick with some kind of virulent GI bug and was hospitalized and saw in person just how hard nurses work. That was the end of that!

As a traveler, I worked in just one hospital that was unionized (University in Cincinnati) and saw the difference for myself.