Hospitals Struggle To Find Balance
Massachusetts hospitals are working continuously to innovate, slow the growth of health care costs and improve patient care. All across the commonwealth, hospitals are voluntarily implementing new care delivery strategies to make sure the care they provide is both better coordinated and more efficient. Simply put, Massachusetts hospitals are living up to their commitments as partners in the health care reform effort.
But hospitals are also encountering a variety of obstacles as they work to do their part to change the health care delivery system for the better. As some of the state’s largest employers in this fragile economy, hospitals face the double pressures of escalating wage and benefit requirements on one extreme and continued government underpayment for the care they provide on the other. Hospitals are trying to balance the many demands on their limited resources in ways that are both creative and allow for the effective continuation of their life-saving missions.
In light of this challenge, it is both disappointing and disturbing that the Massachusetts Nurses Association was reportedly planning a multihospital strike for Good Friday. Such an action would have been disruptive to providing optimal care to patients — though hospitals and their care-giving teams would have worked together diligently to meet every patient’s needs.
While the MNA now denies making a concerted effort to conduct same-day strikes at four Massachusetts hospitals and a facility in Maine, documents left by an MNA member in a meeting room at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester have been turned over to the state Department of Public Health and Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.
Whether this reported strike action was an attempt to influence contract negotiations, mandatory nurse staffing legislation, or both isn’t clear. But it is clearly the wrong thing to do for patients, other hospital workers, and for the local communities involved.
We all need to work together to maintain universal access to quality health care in Massachusetts, and to make that care more affordable. For their part, hospitals are becoming more efficient while simultaneously continuing to improve patient outcomes. Measuring outcomes is the primary method to examine hospital performance — and the efforts of RNs are at the core of this process.
Yet it would be a serious mistake to undervalue or dismiss the contributions of other key members of the care team such as nursing assistants, technicians, pharmacists, and others who round out the care process.
The union wants fixed and inflexible staffing ratios for nurses. But clearly there is no one-size-fits-all method for achieving high-quality, safe patient care, nor should there be. Especially during this time of dramatic, fundamental change in health care, it’s time to think — and act — outside the box, while keeping patient safety at the forefront.
By pursuing innovative approaches to care delivery and quality improvement, hospitals can not only do right by their patients, they can also maintain a supportive work environment while providing good jobs with good pay and benefits. Those jobs, in turn, will allow hospitals and their workforce to contribute to the economy in many ways. That helps everyone.
Lynn Nicholas is president & CEO of the
Boston-based Massachusetts Hospital Association.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments