Nurse-Patient Ratio: Do You Feel Safe?

Nurse-Patient Ratio: Do you feel safe?

As a nurse, you work long hours caring for the sick. Our goal is to provide quality and safe care for all the people we take care of. I have sometimes felt unsafe with the patients I have been assigned to. The nurse-patient ratio in a dialysis unit is 1:9, with two hemodialysis technicians by our sides. We are a given three patients each, but those patients are still my responsibility in all aspect of their care. I sometimes wonder whether the company thinks we are robot who can care and accommodate all those patients in three to four hour sessions. The workload is doable, but the quality of care, and patient safety has become compromised.

Many states have mandated the patient ratio and there has been an increase in patient and nurse satisfaction. As a nurse, I feel that the nurse-patient ratio should be implemented for all. Nurses are not robot who can care and account for all the patients at once. You never know what can happen in a shift, so having enough people to take care of the patient is very important. It increases the quality of care nurses give to the patient, and the patients can be safely taken care off. Nurse patient ratio is not only important for the patients but also for the nurse. Increased burnout has resulted in individuals leaving the profession and the nursing shortage has increased. As much as we have to accommodate our patients, I think that we should be accommodated first. How can we provide a safe environment for our patients, if we ourselves don’t feel safe? I think that we should be taken care off first, before we can take care of our patients.

The nurse-patient ratio has become one of the biggest problems in nursing because we are not being heard. I believe that before assigning how many patients can be safely taken care of by one person, the administrator or the people implementing this should do it themselves first.