Stories of overworked nurses aren’t new. They date to the time of Florence Nightingale herself.

Hospital administrators are spending a lot of money to convince everyone that nursing ratios won’t fix this problem, claiming that flexibility is more important than more staff. What have they done with all of their current flexibility? If flexibility is the key, why are we still having these problems?

The answer is remarkably simple: Administrators of hospitals all over our beautiful country run their hospitals at a bare minimum of staff, knowing that nurses will revert to their fundamental instinct, which is to just handle it. Nurses will do what they need to do to make things work and the administration knows that. That is the definition of exploitation and bedside nurses need the protection that L.D. 1639, An Act to Address Unsafe Staffing of Nurses and Improve Patient Care, will provide.

We will all find ourselves in a hospital bed at one point in our lives. Many reading this have already been there. If you had a good experience with your nurse, then you can reasonably assume that your nurse was breaking a rule or a policy so they could spend more time at your side. Every minute they spend with you is a minute they don’t spend with another patient. Or, to management’s displeasure, one less minute they give to the computer for all of the required charting.

In the almost 12 years I’ve been a nurse, I have been asked to chart more and more, but I have never once been told that there is something I no longer need to chart.

Management is trying to sell the story that there aren’t any more nurses to be found to cover stricter ratios, but I have never once heard them say they won’t be able to find new staff for the sparkling new tower that was just built at Maine Medical Center. They don’t seem to be showing any concern, in fact. Management seems to have no desire to see the system change. Not knowing where new nurses will come from is not a good excuse to hide from the problem. For some reason, management will not acknowledge the basic fact that when a good work environment is offered, good people will find their way to it.

MaineHealth, which operates Maine Med, often talks about how much they value and respect their nurses, but these encouraging words almost never match the administration’s actions. The administration will quickly put distance between the hospital and a nurse who they feel broke a policy with no regard for the fact that it was management who put that nurse in a bad situation in the first place.

Is it really hard to understand why a person wouldn’t want to work for a management group who knowingly puts you in danger, and then sells you out as soon as you make a mistake? They put no effort into nurse retention, which is strange because they also claim it’s impossible to find more nurses. This doesn’t add up. L.D. 1639 will keep more nurses at the bedside and even stands to bring former bedside nurses back.

To say that it has been a trying past few years would be an understatement. I am in favor of L.D. 1639, which calls for stricter patient-to-nurse ratios. The state legislators who will be voting on this bill should know that the general public will suffer if they do not make this change; there won’t be any nurses left to staff our hospitals because of such poor working conditions. They will all leave. That’s already happening and it’s not acceptable.