The fact is nurses are a patient' s best safety net in the hospital. Every day nurses prevent countless problems and complications, catch mistakes before they happen and try to provide the very best care possible in extremely difficult situations. When that safety net gets stretched too thin, mistakes are more likely to happen, as the Tribune article has shown. Conversely, research shows that increased RN staffing results in lower mortality rates, fewer complications, fewer readmissions, and lower costs. Sadly, health care shareholders and reimbursers have ignored nurses' warnings and the research at tremendous cost to patients and nurses.
Nurses are among few groups of professionals whose mistakes can cost lives.
That is why reducing the risks of errors is so important. We do not want impaired or dangerous nurses at the bedside. INA was one of the first state nurses associations to form a Peer Assistance Network for Nurses twenty years ago to help get nurses into treatment. Until then, impaired nurses were often fired from one hospital only to be hired, still impaired, at another. As one of a coalition of nursing organizations, INA currently supports a program that allows nurses to voluntarily step forward for rehabilitation from drug and alcohol dependency problems in lieu of initial discipline against their license.