Finally!
The Pennsylvania House voted last night to ban mandatory overtime (MOT) to all direct care givers in the state. The high use of MOT in PA has been linked to the nursing shortage--in a recent report by the state Department of Health, nearly 9,000 nurses in PA reported having been mandated to work an overtime shift in the two weeks prior to completing the survey.
We're on to the Senate now. Please call your state senator & let them know you support these health care workers. The companion bill in the senate is Tartaglione's SB 692.
For more information on the campaign to ban mandatory overtime, see http://protectpatientcare.org.
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Woo-hoo!
Go SEIU! Way to stand up for workers having control over their own lives!
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BradyDale OnLine
a quick question
What is the alternative to mandatory overtime, considering the current nursing shortage? Do we just go without having shifts be covered?
not a nursing shortage, but a shortage of nurses in hospitals
Well, the first thing I should point out is that there is no one solution to the nursing shortage. But certainly, many nurses that I talk to say the issue isn't that there's a severe shortage right now--it's that the working conditions in the hospitals are so bad that many nurses won't work in them any more. Mandatory overtime is one of the things that drives nurses--particularly younger nurses who have children--from the bedside and into doing things like working in doctors' offices, where they have predictable schedules.
Most nurses in hospitals right now already work 12-hour shifts--so adding another shift means that they are working 24 straight hours.
In our experience, the best way to solve the problem in the hospital is to let the nurses have a voice in scheduling. Obviously, banning mandatory overtime doesn't mean banning voluntary overtime, so part of the solution is that some nurses will still agree to work overtime shifts.
There's a few other things that can happen--1) hospitals can hire more nurses (which isn't just about the nursing shortages, but also about hospitals commiting resources to add positions); 2) hospitals can use agency and pool nurses to fill empty shifts.
There are exemptions in the law in case of emergency--I don't think most nurses will leave the hospital in the middle of an earthquake, tornado, etc., but they can be mandated to do so. But someone calling off sick is not an emergency.
The economics behind MOT for nurses
Having (unfortunately) spent quite a bit of time in hospitals recently with ill family members, I have been appalled at the working conditions for nurses. They are invariably short-staffed and overworked - and almost all the nurses I spoke to had to work back-to-back shifts on a frequent basis. (Yet I have also been deeply moved by seeing the dedicated and highly competent care that nurses give to their patients.)
The reason is simple: cost-cutting by the for-profit companies managing hospital care. The situation is horrendous and getting worse - even in the best of hospitals. I hope that this issue receives more of the attention it deserves.