Amy Love

B/S Editor

aml7458@psu.edu

On September 28th, Pennsylvania State Nurse Association is planning to gather in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to lobby for a new legislation called Patient Safety Act. The purpose of this new act is to secure more nurses and to ensure top-care for patients. With this new measure, there will be a limit on how many patients can be assigned to a nurse. As stated on their website, psna.org, “when nurses are assigned too many patients, patients die.” 

As stated by Bill Engle, who is a current member of the nurse staff in St. Mary Medical Center in Middleton, as well as co-president of the union for nurses at that location, “We’re giving safe care…margin of error for error is getting slimmer and slimmer, and nurses are getting more burnt out.” It is not a surprise that more nurses are beginning to become fatigued after being frontline workers of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of these frontline workers say that their working conditions are leaving them both mentally and physically exhausted. At a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii a nurse named Patrick Switzer gave a description of this feeling. He said it was like “being in a constant state of anxiety, knowing that you don’t have the tools you need to take care of your patients because we’re stretched so thin.”

This is not just in Pennsylvania, throughout the whole nation, hospitals are overwhelmed and being pushed to the limit. Some states, especially those that are beginning to have a new surge of COVID-19 are beginning to offer top dollar for more nurses. Travel nurses, a nurse that is able to travel to various locations and fill temporary nursing positions, are now being offered roughly $3,000 to $5,000 a week. A lot of nurses are quitting their jobs to sign these contracts and get that extra pay. 

One nurse, Kim Davis, quit her job as a nurse to become a travel nurse. She claims she has now roughly doubled her income. Davis says that she knows colleagues that are following the same path, and follows it up with an explanation: “They’re leaving to go travel because why would you do the same job for half pay? If they’re going to risk their lives, they should be compensated.”

Travel nursing is one of the many factors of why nurses are quitting from their original jobs, other reasons include not complying with the hospital’s vaccination requirements, or just being burned-out from dealing with the pandemic. For whatever the reason may be, there is a shortage of nurses at an alarming rate that could lead to many negative consequences, such as patient overload on the nurses who chose to stay. With the Patient Safety Act that is being lobbied soon, will hopefully increase the supply of nurses and lessen the patient-load a nurse is enduring as of now.