"Medicine needs more nurses"
--Florida Today, FL

"Overworked nurses drive up error rate: U.S. study is calling for minimum staffing standards at hospitals"
--Detroit Free Press

Condition Critical: Patients Pay Price for Nursing Shortage
--CNN: Your Health

Many of America’s hospitals are dangerously short staffed. Nurses are often forced to work overtime and asked to deliver care they are not qualified to provide. In almost all cases of understaffing, nurses are assigned more patients than they can safely handle—which can mean missed or incorrect medication, delays in care, patient accidents or worse.

Not being able to provide adequate care for patients has driven hundreds of thousands of qualified nurses out of nursing. Meanwhile hospitals are seeing an increase in the number of patients requiring greater care. This means that fewer nurses are responsible for a larger population of sicker patients.

This situation cannot continue. The National Consumers League is supporting a national campaign, launched by the more than half a million nurses of the AFL-CIO, to make sure that all hospitals adopt safe staffing standards.

We have joined this campaign to protect patients. We want to hear from you. If you have had an experience that involved nurse staffing in hospitals (positive or negative) in the last 5 years, please share it with us.

Go to NCL's Nurse Staffing Survey.

More Nurse Staffing Coverage in the News.