Support Registered Nurses at The Scarborough Hospital

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I am concerned about The Scarborough Hospital not recognizing that Registered Nurses (RNs) are the best value in health care. The amount of direct patient care RNs provide is directly linked to mortality and morbidity rates. Higher RN ratios result in fewer deaths, pressure ulcers, pneumonia, post-operative infections, urinary tract infections, gastrointestinal bleeds and cardiac arrests. Results also include shorter lengths of stay, improved failure to rescue rates, and superior organizational effectiveness and budgetary outcomes. Not having enough RNs to provide the right care up front, quickly leads to increased costs. The Ontario government that was elected last year promised to protect health care. Insufficient funding for hospitals that results in RN layoffs, not filling vacant RN positions, and replacing RNs with less-skilled workers who have no professional nursing training, is not acceptable. Our health care system has been down this road before. During the 1990s, some consultants went from one health care organization to the next recommending RN substitution and a shift from primary nursing and total patient care to fragmented care delivered by teams (substituting less-skilled workers in place of RNs). Years later, realizing their failed and costly experiment, the same organizations re-hired RNs. Claiming that RN staff is inefficient, and that primary nursing or total patient care are outdated is a blatant reversion to "team nursing," a model discredited in the 1970s because it delivers fragmented care, and deprives patients of the continuity of care and caregiver they need and deserve. Whatever it might be called today, reducing the number of RNs at The Scarborough Hospital is a step backwards, and one taken against all available scientific evidence. Your family deserves the best health care possible and so does mine. My request is simple. To my elected representatives in the provincial legislature: - direct the managers of our public hospitals to stop cutting RNs; - fund hospitals adequately; - stop the budget cuts; and - ensure there is the revenue that's needed to provide the highest quality health care we all want and deserve. To the managers of my community's hospital: - RNs are the best value in health care - we need more of them, not less; - don't waste any more money on consultants to present cuts to my health care as good news; and - lobby the decision-makers who control the funding to provide adequate resources instead of repackaging a discredited model of nursing care as something new.
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