Nursing Advisory Board Asks State to Take a Harder Look at Hospital Staffing Plans

An official advisory body has asked that the state take a second look at hospitals’ plans to check if they comply with the state’s new nurse staffing law.

The law requires hospitals to rewrite their staffing plans to comply with new mandatory patient-to-nurse ratios. Many hospitals, but not all, have already submitted updated plans to the state, which the Oregon Health Authority has published on its website.

But those plans don’t pass muster, nurses say. For one, the plans violate the spirit of the law, they say, by making nurses take on more patients—not less.

And, they argue, the plans violate a clear provision of the law as well. They’re supposed to be signed off on by both hospital management and rank-and-file nurses. But many of the plans received by the state weren’t.

The Oregon Health Authority published them on its website anyway. The implications are not clear. The agency is currently investigating hundreds of complaints from nurses, but has yet to release its conclusions.

Paige Spence, director of government relations at the Oregon Nurses Association, says OHA’s deference to the hospitals could have left nurses with the false impression that the plans were valid. “The manager could point to the OHA website and say it’s on the state’s regulatory website—it’s your plan, too bad.”

OHA says it’s just following the letter of the law, which states “the Oregon Health Authority shall post on a website…the hospital staffing plans received,” explained OHA manager Dana Selover at the Nurse Staffing Advisory Board meeting on July 31. “There are no extra criteria by which they are pre-vetted.”

This explanation outraged several of the members of the board, which then voted unanimously to “validate” the plans before publishing them.

Jonathan Modie, an agency spokesman, tells WW that OHA leaders will review the recommendation and ask state lawyers if they have the authority to implement it.