Betsy Marville, RN -- one of our superb leaders here at Healthcare United -- recently had a "Letter to the Editor" published in the July 28th issue of Modern Healthcare.  We’re proud of her for speaking out on an issue that’s vitally important, and we wanted to share some quotes with you.

Betsy is a long-standing advocate for safe staffing standards and patient safety, and you've likely heard from her on this subject before.  In her Op-Ed, she writes about how she is "pleased" with the Joint Commission’s attempt to “establish standards of safe and acceptable behavior for healthcare providers to ensure patient safety.”  However, states Betsy, she has “many concerns as to the actual impact of the alert,” and that “the Joint Commission in the past has failed to set limits on mandatory overtime for healthcare providers or establish safe staffing standards.”

She continues:

“Will the ‘zero tolerance’ standard truly be equally applied to the physician and supervisor as well as the nursing and support staff? Can this standard—’Passive activities such as refusing to perform assigned tasks or quietly exhibiting uncooperative attitudes during routine activities’—be used against a healthcare professional who refuses to take an unsafe assignment or perform an unsafe procedure in his/her role as patient advocate?”

“In theory and goal, the standards are admirable. In the reality of a broken healthcare system—increasingly being held together by healthcare providers working with low pay, declining benefits, increasing patient violence, unsafe staffing, mandatory overtime, declining uninterrupted break time and high staff turnover—the standards appear to be another tool to potentially harass and intimidate workers.”

You can read the full op-ed (subscription required) here.

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