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Disputed Union Study Says State Lacks Nurses

Posted on: Thursday, 25 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 24--TAMPA -- The hospital nurse shortage is bad nationwide but even worse in Florida, says a union-sponsored study that many experts say is flawed.

The report, released Tuesday, says that Florida patients receive 7.3 hours of nursing daily, which is 20 percent below the national average. The report also found wide variations in staff levels, with some hospitals at double or even triple that of others.

In the Tampa Bay region, the staffing was even lower, an average of 6.6 hours of daily nursing per patient. It ranged from a high of 11.9 at Highlands Regional Medical Center in Sebring to a low of four hours at Pasco County's Regional Medical Center at Bayonet Point.

"Consumers need increased and improved access to information about the time nurses have to spend with their patients in order to make informed choices about where to receive care," union President Monica Russo told reporters by teleconference.

Some knowledgeable nurses questioned the wide variations found in staffing.

"I find it difficult to believe that in a given region they would have that much disparity," says Mary Lou Brunell, executive director of the Florida Nursing Center at the University of Central Florida.

She advised a thorough review of the study's methodology. "These assumptions really need to be looked at."

May Va Lor, author of the report, "Falling Short: How Nurse Staffing Compares at Florida Hospitals," acknowledged there are shortcomings. For one thing, the state hospital data are for 2003, and the national comparison data are from 1997.

The study, commissioned by the SEIU Florida Healthcare Union, is the first analysis carried out on nurse staffing data that hospitals now report to the state under a 2004 law.

Union representatives on the conference call said their goal is to win a state and eventually a national cap on the number of hospital patients per nurse. California is the only state with such a law.

"All we're asking is for better staffing," said Rolando Davila, a registered nurse at Cedars Medical Center in Miami. "Staffing saves lives."

If the report stands up to scrutiny, it will cause great concern among health authorities because there's a well- documented link between nurse staffing levels and patient health. A 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found the chance of dying was 31 percent greater in hospitals that had eight patients per nurse than in those with four patients per nurse.

Even the chief nursing officer at top-ranked Highlands Regional said the findings seem flawed. Allison Mulholland said it's unlikely that a 126-bed community hospital in Sebring would be twice as well staffed as Tampa General Hospital, which must keep nursing levels high to maintain its designation as a trauma center. More likely, she said, the analysis is distorted by the relatively small number of patients at Highlands compared with the big metro hospitals. Her hospital has to have staff nurses available even when there are few patients.

Kurt Conover, a spokesman for Bayonet Point, said the report's staffing numbers for his hospital are too low, although he could not provide exact figures. He contended that the study's methodology was flawed. For instance, temporary nurses hired from staffing agencies were not included in the union's study.

The report, along with the list of area hospitals, can be found on the Internet at seiufhu.localsonline.org.

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Source: Tampa Tribune

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