Fuq! I hate getting asked this question. The problem is that both sides are so entrenched in their distrust of each other that they’ve lost sight of the big picture.
It’s a labor/management argument. The hospitals spend a fortune on personnel. An ‘average’ nurse in the city of Boston makes well over 100K/year. Before shift and weekend differentials or overtime. I believe top step in the city is at the Brigham and is around $70/hr.). That’s a sh!tload of money. Management would can that nurse in a nanosecond if they could and replace him/her with three new grads and they’d still save money. Do you want your mother being taken care of by a nurse who barely knows where the best bathrooms are in the hospital? Or who doesn’t know that “The Doctor” just graduated med school herself and is relying on experienced nurses to keep her from killing somebody?
It’s all about money. I believe that if it passed nurses will end up shooting them selves in the foot and end up getting replaced by non licensed personnel with lesser education and experience. Not good for the patients. Not good for the nurses.
OTOH, I’ve had my share of unsafe assignments. I’ve been scared sh!tless that I’m going to kill somebody because I have somebody over here who’s trying real hard to die and I’ve got the supervisor up my ass to take another critically ill patient who’s on the way down from the OR ‘NOW!’ Oh and I’ve got five ‘easy’ patients who all need attention, and the idiot intern is asking me to do spectacularly stupid and pointless things. And I haven’t visited my favorite bathroom in 11 hours.
This will eliminate flexibility. It will not allow me to say “Hey Dland, I’m doing ok here right now. I’ll take the admission and medicate your others. I’ll let you know if there are any problems and I’ll square it with the supervisor. You’re buying the beer after work”.
It will prevent us working together to do the reason we are all there, to take care of sick people. Even today, working as an NP, if I see a patient in my clinic and decide they need to be admitted I’ll tell the nurse, “You go do X, Y and Z. I’ll do ABC and we’ll get him upstairs.” I’m still a nurse even if I’m a super fancy-pants nurse and I wear a tie to work every day. I’m going to help my nurses take care of my patient. Teamwork is critical. This law will worsen the divide between labor and management because of inflexible quotas.
I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to vote on this before I started answering this. (BTW, I SHOULD be watching the Wild Card Game right now and drinking instead to getting pissed off typing on my iPhone. Tomorrow is my day off.) But I think I convinced myself to vote against it. I hope none of my former union sisters find out, I’ll be a pariah. FWIW, SWMBO (Also an NP) is voting for it.
All I want to do is take care of sick little old ladies. They’re the only people I really like. The politics of it pisses me off. Leave me out of the argument. Even though I’m no longer a bedside ICU or ER nurse I’ll always take the next metaphorical admission. That next admission could be your mother.
A pox on both their houses.