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The Impact of State Laws, Rules, and Regulations on Nursing Staffing
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The Impact of State Laws, Rules, and Regulations on Nursing Staffing
State laws, rules, and regulations play a major role in determining the staffing of nurses,
which in turn affects the patients and the workload of the nurses. These legislative measures are
aimed at providing safety to the patients, improving the quality of the care that they receive and
also the workload of nurses (McHugh et al., 2021). For instance, California rules require UTs to
maintain a minimum nurse-patient ratio for all acute care facilities; research has demonstrated
that these requirements are linked with decreased mortality rates and other positive changes in
patients, such as decreased hospital readmissions, fewer patient falls, and pressure ulcers. Such
regulations help to ensure adequate staffing levels to negate the occurrence of adverse events
commonly experienced in intensive care units, such as cardiac arrest and respiratory failure.
However, the effectiveness of these laws, when enacted, may have positive or negative
impacts. On the one hand, they are helpful in creating a situation in which both patients and
nurses would be safer and more cooperative. Adequate staffing helps to avoid what may be
called missed care, which is defined as delayed, partially completed or uncompleted care and
contributes to the provision of the full range of necessary care for patients (Vaismoradi, 2020).
However, there are debates over how such staffing ratios result in cost implications since they
may be financially demanding for health facilities, especially those that are small or in jeopardy
of getting little funding. The current staffing ratios may be impossible to meet while maintaining
financial viability, and this has implications such as cutting down on services or even ceasing to
operate.
Moreover, the effectiveness of these regulations also depends on their implementation as
well as the allocation of competent resources in terms of financial ability to recruit and retain
adequate nursing staff. For the effectiveness of these initiated laws in advancing patient safety
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and improving nurse job satisfaction, it is pivotal to strike a balance between the prescriptive
rules and realistic application by healthcare organizations (Ball & Griffiths, 2021). Therefore,
state laws, rules and regulations directly affect the staffing of nurses and tend to either promote
its positive aspects or act as barriers to its effective execution.
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References
Ball, J. E., & Griffiths, P. (2021). Consensus Development Project (CDP): an Overview of
Staffing for Safe and Effective Nursing Care. Nursing Open, 9(2).
https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.989
McHugh, M., Aiken, L., Sloane, D., Windsor, C., Douglas, C., & Yates, P. (2021). Effects of
nurse-to-patient ratio legislation on nurse staffing and patient mortality, readmissions, and
length of stay: a prospective study in a panel of hospitals. The Lancet, 397(10288), 1905–
1913. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00768-6
Vaismoradi, M. (2020). Nurses’ Adherence to Patient Safety principles: a Systematic Review.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(6), 1–15.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7142993/