NURS 8100 Issues in Health Care Reform (Interview)
Healthcare reform means changing how healthcare works in a country or state. It’s about dealing with the increasing costs of healthcare for people, families, and the government. Healthcare reform is all about making healthcare better for everyone and making it easier for people to get health insurance. The goal is to reduce the number of people who don’t have insurance, make healthcare more affordable, and make it better. In my course, I talked to a state legislator about a healthcare reform issue that I find interesting. This paper is about what we talked about during the interview and the healthcare reform issues I brought up.
Is the Conflict Between Nurses and Doctors Real?
The Legislator I Talked To
I wanted to talk to a legislator from my state, Illinois, about the healthcare reform that interests me. With some help from my colleagues, I set up a meeting with Representative LaToya Greenwood through her assistant. Greenwood is a member of the Democratic Party and serves in the Illinois House of Representatives. She has represented the 114th district since January 2017 and is the chair of the Health Care Availability and Access Committee (Illinois General Assembly, n.d.). She’s also on several other committees like Prescription Drug Affordability, Agriculture & Conservation, Approp-Elementary & Secondary Education (Vice-Chairperson), Data Analytics & IT, Appropriations-Human Services, Cybersecurity, Public Utilities, Museums, Arts, & Cultural Enhancement.
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NURS 8100 Issues in Health Care Reform (Interview)
Rep. LaToya Greenwood is a great choice because of her impressive record. She’s sponsored many bills, and she recently passed House Bill 4645 to improve healthcare for minorities and make sure everyone gets good care (Illinois General Assembly, n.d.). She believes that every person in Illinois deserves high-quality healthcare that doesn’t cost too much. She’s also committed to making prescription drugs affordable and increasing the healthcare workforce.
Summary of the Interview
The meeting was scheduled for April 15, 2022, at Representative Greenwood’s office from 10 am to 12 pm. When I got there, she welcomed me, and after we got to know each other a bit, I explained why I wanted to talk to her and what I hoped to achieve from our meeting. The healthcare reform I wanted to discuss was about making a law that sets specific ratios of nurses to patients in all healthcare settings in Illinois. I told her that in Illinois, hospitals don’t follow the nurse-to-patient ratios recommended by the World Health Organization. These ratios are supposed to make sure patients get safe care and to prevent nurses from getting too tired. I mentioned the California law that sets these ratios. The law was passed because there were concerns that not having enough nurses on duty was putting patients’ safety at risk, especially as health problems become more serious and care becomes more complex (Livanos, 2018).
I explained the benefits of making a law about these nurse-to-patient ratios and the problems that not having this law is causing in our state. The number of nurses assigned to patients affects how well patients do and how often they get sick or die. Hospitals with too few nurses are putting extra work on the nurses they have, which can lead to burnout. Hospitals with high nurse workloads also have more medical mistakes and things that nurses forget to do. Studies have shown that there are more infections in hospitals with too few nurses, like urinary tract infections and pneumonia, and that there’s a higher chance of not getting CPR in these hospitals.
The Benefits of the Reform
I told Rep. Greenwood that the reform to set nurse-to-patient ratios would have many benefits. It would improve how patients do, reduce how many people get sick or die, and make nurses happier in their jobs (Griffiths et al., 2018). Having enough nurses on duty makes nurses happier and makes them stay in their jobs longer, which means healthcare organizations don’t have to spend so much money finding and hiring new nurses. Having the right nurse-to-patient ratios also makes patients do better and, most importantly, it can save lives. One study found that patients were 95% more likely to survive when hospitals had the right nurse-to-patient ratios (Lee et al., 2018). Also, when nurses have to take care of too many very sick patients, the patients are less likely to survive.
Challenges with the Reform
We talked about the problems that might come up if we make this law about nurse staffing ratios and how we can solve them. I told Rep. Greenwood that the big problem is that healthcare organizations will have to hire more nurses, but they won’t get paid more to take care of patients. And the extra money it costs to hire more nurses won’t be covered by more payments to healthcare organizations (de Cordova et al., 2019). This is called an “unfunded mandate.” But there’s a way to fix this problem. We can give healthcare organizations a good reason to have the right number of nurses, like giving them more money when they do it. This way, the money healthcare organizations get will depend on how well they take care of patients and not on where patients stay.
What the Legislator Said Rep. Greenwood liked what I had to say because she wants to have more people working in public health in Illinois. She agreed that this reform would make nurses happier and help patients get better care, which would lead to better health for everyone. She asked for a printed copy of my proposal so she could read it and maybe make some changes. She also said that we would have another meeting to talk about any changes and what to do next.
In Conclusion
The healthcare reform I care about is making laws about the right nurse-to-patient ratios. I talked to Rep. LaToya Greenwood from the Illinois House of Representatives about it. We talked about the good things that would happen if we make this law and some of the problems we might have and how to fix them.
References
de Cordova, P. B., Rogowski, J., Riman, K. A., & McHugh, M. D. (2019). Effects of Public Reporting Legislation of Nurse Staffing: A Trend Analysis. Policy, politics & nursing practice, 20(2), 92–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527154419832112
Griffiths, P., Maruotti, A., Recio Saucedo, A., & Redfern, O. C. (2018). Nurse staffing, nursing assistants and hospital mortality: retrospective longitudinal cohort study. BMJ Qual Saf.. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2018-008043
Illinois General Assembly. (n.d.). Representative Biography. https://www.ilga.gov/house/Rep.asp?MemberID=2902
Lee, A., Cheung, Y. S. L., Joynt, G. M., Leung, C. C. H., Wong, W. T., & Gomersall, C. D. (2018). Are high nurse workload/staffing ratios associated with decreased survival in critically ill patients? A cohort study. Annals of intensive care, 7(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13613-018-0269-2
Livanos, N. (2018). A broadening coalition: Patient safety enters the Nurse-to-Patient ratio debate. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 9(1), 68-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2155-8256(18)30056-5
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