A Resident Says No To Question 1, Yes For Colarusso

A Letter to the Editor from Corinne Fogarty:

I am writing to you as a professional nurse with over 12 years of inpatient staff nursing experience. I currently work as a resource/staff nurse in pediatrics and relish the opportunity to be part of helping children and families during extremely difficult times. I absolutely love my job; that is why I am writing about Question 1.

On November 6th , Massachusetts voters will vote on this question that stands to alter healthcare in our state in a major way. It is important to me that Massachusetts maintains some of the best hospitals in the world and continues to provide world class care to patients. You would be hard pressed to find a nurse anywhere that doesn’t put patient safety as a top priority, but this law will not make patient care safer. There is more to patient safety than simply the number of patients assigned to any one nurse, and there is a good deal of training and experience that goes into knowing that balance; there is no magic number. Some patients may require more nursing care than others at any given time.

It is nurses who should make the decisions about what care patients need. If your loved one was getting
sicker, I’d bet you would want nurses to be able to rearrange assignments to provide more care for
them. Or, if your loved one was another patient assigned to that nurse taking care of the sicker patient,
wouldn’t it be nice if another nurse could be assigned to them so they weren’t neglected? If this law
passes, the ability of nurses to decide patient assignments based on acuity of patients will be highly
affected; and in many cases, not possible. Different hospitals have different levels of patient acuity, how
can you say the number of patients assigned to nurses at all hospitals across the state should be the
same? My professional perspective in working as a nurse is that hospitals, managers and nursing teams
are highly committed to a career of helping people and doing it safely; let’s keep the decisions around
patient assignments where they belong, with nurses and individual hospitals; if hospitals are falling short
on patient safety let us put our efforts into fixing individual problems and not try to put a one size fits all
law into place.

California is the only other state in our nation with similar (less stringent) staffing ratios and they
already score lower than Massachusetts in patient safety and satisfaction. California also had a much
longer time to comply with the mandated ratio’s, the proposed law as it is now only gives Massachusetts
hospitals 37 business days to fully comply with staffing ratios ... would you want a nurse with only 37
days of training? Perhaps we should spend more effort and money on looking into the hospitals that
are struggling to keep our patients and nurses safe instead of on legislation that will do neither of those
things.

This ballot question means a great deal to me as a nurse, patient and mother. I have chosen to write about only a couple of the basic reasons that this law seems wrong for Massachusetts, because I could go on and on about the ways it could affect so many of my patients, friends and loved ones. I’m not someone that will typically get involved in politics, but I felt this was too important of a question for myself and our state to remain silent about.

I asked Caroline Colarusso to come to my kitchen table to talk with me about this and she listened to all my concerns as a professional. I believe Caroline gets it! She explained she has been contacted from both sides of the issue and has given thought to all opinions. Caroline unlike her opponent has arrived to the conclusion that this would not be good for patient care, would be quite costly, and would be devastating to community hospitals that serve the medical needs of many. Thank you, Caroline, for standing with the many nurses who wish to work together for the best possible quality care for our patients in Massachusetts. I’m supporting Caroline Colarusso for State Representative and asking all of you to vote NO on Question 1.

Corinne Fogarty, Green Street