TARTAGLIONE CONTINUES FIGHT FOR HEALTHCARE WORKERS AND PATIENTS

HARRISBURG, MAY 1, 2007 – After a successful six-year battle to raise the minimum wage, Sen. Christine M. Tartaglione is resuming another long fight for working Pennsylvanians: outlawing forced overtime for healthcare workers.

     As the body of evidence grows linking long and erratic nursing shifts to an alarming number of medical mistakes, Tartagline has reintroduced legislation (Senate Bill 835) to prevent healthcare providers from forcing overtime on employees.

     In the six years that Tartaglione has pushed the issue, studies have increasingly shown she is on the right track.

     “Extensive research has demonstrated the link between overtime in health care and medical errors. It’s well known that physical and mental exhaustion can affect one’s ability to think clearly and act safely,” Tartaglione told her colleagues on the Senate floor today. “Truck drivers, airplane pilots and flight attendants all have restrictions on the number of hours they may work to protect the public safety.  Yet there are no such restrictions for health care workers, who may be making life or death decisions and observations.”

     Because mandatory overtime comes with little or no warning, caregivers cannot prepare for the longer shift, Tartaglione said.  Nurses are forced to work whether or not they are well rested enough to continue safely and regardless of their personal and family responsibilities.

     The result, research has shown, has far-reaching consequences.

• The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated hospital deaths due to medical errors at 44,000 to 98,000 annually, and research has confirmed that long work hours and overtime contribute to medical errors.  They found that shift durations of greater than 12 hours were significantly associated with increased errors among nurses.
   

• A 2004 study by University of Pennsylvania Researcher Ann Rogers found that the risk of errors increased when nurses worked overtime or worked more than 40 hours per week.  In fact, the risk of error was 3 times higher when a nurse worked a 12.5 hour shift or longer.

 ·        A 1992 study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that nurses who worked variable schedules (including mandatory overtime) were twice as likely to report errors or accidents related to sleepiness, and at least two studies have linked infection outbreaks at hospitals to overtime work.

·        A 2004 report by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee of the General Assembly, job dissatisfaction was cited as a major contributing factor to the problems of recruiting and retaining nurses, and mandatory overtime is among the key factors identified by various studies as contributing to job dissatisfaction among nurses.

     “Healthcare corporations say that they need to force overtime because of staff shortages,” Tartaglione said. “But mandatory overtime is an ironic solution.  It makes their problem worse, not better.”

      The dangerous practice of mandatory overtime is contributing to what the federal Health Resources and Services Administration predicts will be a shortage of over one million nurses nationwide by the year 2020,” Tartaglione said.