Nurses celebrate legislative win while regrouping for another try at staffing minimums
Ohio’s nurses had two big asks for lawmakers in the most recent legislative session. They got one of them. Assuming Gov. Mike DeWine signs the bill into law, hospitals will have to start developing security plans and reporting workplace violence in the coming year. But nurses’ bigger ask — codified minimum staffing standards — will have to wait.
Although advocates are celebrating what they were able to accomplish, they know getting the other half of their wish list will be a difficult task once lawmakers get back to work.
What passed
House Bill 452 aims to address concerns about workplace violence by improving security practices within hospitals. Hospitals and hospital systems will be required to put security plans down in writing for state health officials to review each year. Facilities would also have to develop an incident reporting system and post notices warning that aggressive behavior won’t be tolerated.
Additionally, the measure establishes civil immunity for people acting in self-defense or the defense of someone else.
That’s an important provision to Ron Smith, a Dayton area man who began lobbying for changes after his daughter Tristin, a former nurse, died by suicide.
“Where she worked at, you were on your own if you were attacked or anything like that,” Smith explained, “meaning that that the hospital is not going to be held liable if you fight back or anything like that.”
In a letter addressing her profession as an abusive partner, Tristin described being told not to fight back in the event of a violent incident. She recalled being told to cover her face and wait for security to arrive.
“She never felt safe at the place that she worked at,” Smith said. “And that is one of the reasons why I supported this bill.”
Still, Smith argued lawmakers could do more to protect healthcare workers. Like many others, he noted people in hospitals are often dealing with some sort of crisis and with heightened emotions they can be volatile. He said metal detectors in emergency departments might be a good safeguard.
In committee hearings, the nurses’ union urged lawmakers to establish elevated penalties for assaulting healthcare workers with bodily fluids. Similar protections exist for law enforcement officers, but state lawmakers didn’t add the provision to the bill.
… And what didn’t
Even as he praised lawmakers for sending the bill to the governor’s desk, Ohio Nurses Association president Rick Lucas reiterated their call for staffing standards.
“This legislation is a critical first step toward,” he said, “protecting Ohio’s nurses and health professionals from the violence they face daily while caring for others, however, our work is far from done.”
House Bill 285 would have set minimum staff to patient ratios for hospitals around the state, but the idea received sharp pushback from the Ohio Hospital Association. In a letter to House Speaker Jason Stephens over the summer, they cited “unprecedented labor shortages” and argued “mandating staffing ratios only creates more disruption in a historically unstable labor market.”
Despite a few hearings, the measure didn’t gain enough traction. Still Lucas said nurses remain “unwavering in our commitment to fight for safe staffing.”
“Hospital executives continue to prioritize profits over patient care, creating unsafe conditions for employees and jeopardizing the lives of those they serve,” he said. “Minimum staffing standards must be established and enforced in every hospital across Ohio.”
“This is the foundation for addressing the staffing crisis and protecting both patients and healthcare workers,” Lucas added.
Smith plans to be back, too, advocating for the staffing requirements he believes would have better protected Tristin and nurses like her.
“It’s really not easy for me to talk about your daughter taking her life, you know, it’s not an easy thing to do, and it gets a little emotional sometimes,” he said. “But the goal is, what she wrote in her letter, to fix them things, because that’s ultimately what really drove her out of nursing and to her death — depression and all that.”
Still, over the holidays, he and his family are focusing on what they were able to do, rather than the work left to be done.
“In reflection, this past year, I feel like this is a gift,” he said. “We accomplished something out of this.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2024 at 5:03 AM