Quality Care for Our Patients

Providing quality healthcare begins with taking care of those who deliver healthcare services. It begins with a living wage, comprehensive benefits, a safe work environment, professional respect and dignity.   

Ending Mandatory Overtime

As patients get sicker and hospital stays are shorter, the demands on nurses’ work grow disproportionately.   Employers are routinely relying on mandated overtime to cover shift shortages by requiring nurses to remain on duty for a period longer than eight consecutive hours, or forty hours in a seven-day workweek.

This takes a severe toll on nurses, their families, and their patients.   Extensive use of mandatory overtime can cause increased medical errors, poor patient outcomes, high stress, and sleep depravation, all which unduly have a negative impact on nurses’ family lives.

1199SEIU supports pending legislation in New York to ban mandatory overtime for nurses, to prevent employers from requiring nurses to work more than regularly scheduled work hours except in certain specified emergency situations. Mandatory overtime has been outlawed for airline pilots, air traffic controllers, truck drivers and train engineers. Nurses are no less important to public care and safety than such professions. They deserve the same recognition.

Enforcing Safe Staffing Ratios

1199SEIU members play a central role in delivering quality patient care in hospitals and nursing homes across the country.   Understaffing in healthcare facilities is becoming more common, as employers deal with financial pressures by reducing their staff.

1199SEIU supports pending legislation in New York and Maryland that would require minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. 

Another step to ensure that health care facilities consider the needs of patients is to provide the public with vital nurse-to-patient ratio information. With such information, consumers can pressure hospitals to implement and maintain safe staffing levels to guarantee quality healthcare. 1199SEIU also supports pending legislation in New York that would require the disclosure of this important information.

For more information visit http://www.seiu.org/health/nurses/.

Struggling for Quality Home Care

SEIU is the largest union of homecare workers in the nation. These vital healthcare workers play a crucial role in taking care of the disabled, elderly and chronically ill.   The work is demanding and offers few rewards. Most homecare workers have no health insurance, standard job benefits, job training and a living wage. They care for our loved ones who are too sick or unable to leave the home, but they struggle to make ends meet for themselves and their own families.  With such conditions, the homecare industry experiences a high turnover rate of qualified caregivers.  In turn, the quality care patients deserve is jeopardized, as the continuity of care from their providers is interrupted.

Across the country, SEIU is working to secure the well-being and dignity of home care workers and patients.  For more information visit http://www.seiu.org/longterm/home_care/index.cfm.