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A health care watchdog said Wednesday that an election-related voting issue aimed at regulating nurse staffing in hospitals could cost more than $ 900 million a year in Massachusetts.
The estimate poses a new challenge to the Massachusetts Nurses Association, which drafted the voting question and asserted that the costs would be much more modest, up to $ 47 million. Question 1 would impose strict limits on the number of patients assigned to nurses working in hospitals.
In a new report, the first independent analysis of the poll question, the Commission on State Health Policy said hospitals should hire 2,286 to 3,101 additional full-time nurses to attend the polls. comply with the measure. The impact would be particularly important in community hospitals and in psychiatric and labor and delivery units, the agency said.
The report states that all this hiring would be very expensive: 676 to 949 million dollars per year. These cost estimates include salary increases for existing nurses.
"The estimates will probably be conservative," the report says.
The commission's figures are similar to the cost estimates set by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association, a hospital-based group that opposes the vote issue and has spent millions of dollars trying to defeat it.
The nurses' union attacked the Health Policy Commission last week after the agency announced that it was studying the measure of the vote by ballot. She issued another critical statement on Wednesday.
"This HPC cost estimate is irresponsible and inconsistent and is unlike anything the HPC has ever done," said Julie Pinkham, Executive Director of the Nurses Union.
"This estimates a cost of $ 300,000 per nurse [full-time equivalent] per year and, like inflated figures distributed by hospital leaders, there is no independent source of data or transparency in these cost estimates. "
Union officials argued that nurses were overloaded with patients and that the workload was limited to improve medical care. For a typical medical or surgical patient, the voting issue sets a limit of four patients to one nurse. The limits would vary by hospital unit.
The commission's report revealed that question 1 could generate potential savings by helping to reduce the length of stay of hospitalized patients and adverse events. But these potential savings – from about $ 34 million to $ 47 million – would be largely offset by the costs associated with hiring new nurses, the commission said.
The question will appear on the national ballot on November 6th.
Priyanka Dayal McCluskey can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @priyanka_dayal.
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