To the editor:
Question 1 on our Nov. 6 ballots would establish a law to require minimum nurse-patient staffing ratios for all Massachusetts hospitals, ratios that would vary widely depending on the service — emergency room, intensive care step-down units, stable medical floor patients, maternity patients, etc.
I have studied this issue a lot over the past 17 months. I am inclined to vote Yes on Question 1 but, before I commit to that inclination, I still need to learn more about the nurse staffing issues than has been published since they became front-page news in May 2017 and again last October when Berkshire Medical Center nurses went on strike.
The nurse staffing issues are complex. My own understanding of them has not been helped by soundbite-sized assertions about what the adoption of Question 1 would mean for patients. Our regional news media could help voters begin to come to grips with these issues by summarizing representative samples of the abundant relevant open-source material as a first take, and by giving us accounts of interviews with independent experts as a second take.
Berkshire Health Systems spokesman Michael Leary and top BHS managers have repeatedly asserted that the hospital has been following the “best practices guidelines” of the American Nursing Association on nurse staffing. There are, in fact, no published ANA guidelines applicable in concrete detail to a hospital like BMC, as an elementary fact-checking search revealed in mid-2017. Question 1 provides such detail, which would become state law Jan. 1 with its passage.
The competing claims of the hospital industry and of the union for BMC nurses can be confusing. Most of us will not want (or be able) to take the time and effort to study this complex issue by reading the material linked to the ANA website, and the many relevant academic papers linked to on the Massachusetts Nurses Association website.
I have studied some of this literature. As a former reporter frustrated by the complete absence of any accounts of it in our regional media, I have wanted for many months to write my own freelance articles on this important matter, informed by interviews with independent experts at university schools of nursing, medicine, public health, labor relations and health care economics. For the past two years, a personal health issue has prevented me from doing the travel necessary to conduct such interviews. If I can get some of these experts to talk in phone interviews (much less preferable than ones done face to face), I hope to write at least a brief summary to share with Edge readers before Nov. 6.
Meanwhile, I do agree with the line in a recent editorial that advised readers: “… as far as ad campaigns go, it is wise to watch both with a skeptical eye.” I would add to that advice, however, that, over the past 18 months, I have found the assertions and information from MNA leaders on nurse staffing issues to be more credible and better documented than the ones from BHS management.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
