The Massachusetts Senate has unanimously passed a bill that would limit the number of patients that can be assigned to intensive care nurses.
The state’s top nurses’ union has pushed two ballot measures to create a nurse-patient ratio limit, and to increase transparency in hospital profits. Now the union says it will pull both those measures when this bill becomes law.
Senator Stan Rosenberg of Amherst introduced the bill, and worked out a compromise between nurses and hospitals. He says he started meeting with the two sides seven months ago.
“I used a kind of subtle diplomacy approach of meeting separately with the nurses and hospital administrators, and bringing information back and forth and I was able to find that there was some common ground,” says Rosenberg.
The bill would require that nurses in intensive care units have only one patient at a time, with some exceptions. The legislature has not acted on the nurses’ second ballot measure, but the union has agreed to drop it as part of the compromise. The bill now heads to Governor Deval Patrick. He needs to sign it before next Wednesday to keep the questions off the ballot.