Nearly nine in 10 registered nurses in Massachusetts say the overall quality of the healthcare system has degraded over the past two years and inadequate staffing at hospitals is one of the biggest challenges they face, according to a new survey released Friday.
A poll of 531 registered nurses in the state commissioned by the Massachusetts Nurses Association and carried out by Beacon Research also found that three-quarters of surveyed nurses say they are caring for too many patients at one time and do not have enough time to provide each patient with the care and attention they need.
Patients often require more resources and time because they may have delayed seeking care during the pandemic, said Katie Murphy, an ICU registered nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
“The lack of nurses at the bedside is felt even more acutely because the patients need more of our time,” Murphy told the Herald. “We’re just not finding the resources that we need.”
The association has conducted the poll 11 times since 2003, and results from previous years show that nurses working in Massachusetts increasingly said the quality of hospital care in the state worsened during the pandemic.
Some of that could be attributed to staffing and patient care.
“RNs also continue to report that understaffing is the biggest obstacle they face in doing their job and delivering quality care to patients. This is reported by over half of nurses, with over six-in-ten of those at direct care teaching and community hospitals reporting understaffing as the biggest problem they face,” a summary of the poll said.
Massachusetts hospitals are navigating an unprecedented set of pressures brought on in the wake of the pandemic, said Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association Vice President of Clinical Affairs Patricia Noga.
Noga said there are an estimated 19,000 full-time job vacancies at hospitals across the state.
“This is a time for our commonwealth to embrace new, progressive ideas that can boost the ranks of healthcare professionals and take pressure off the caregivers who have been on the front lines of the pandemic for more than three years,” Noga said in a statement.
Workplace violence has become a “much more serious problem” for local nurses in the past two years, the poll said. Sixty-three percent of registered nurses said violence has been a “serious problem” for them. Another 24% said they do not feel safe in their workplace, according to the poll.
Murphy said healthcare professionals are assaulted “all the time,” whether it’s a patient kicking, biting, stabbing, pushing, or punching.
“It is so under-reported,” Murphy said. “… We want hospitals to make sure that the nurses are not using his or her own time, can take days off to recover, to report this to the police.”
Beacon Research randomly selected registered nurses for the poll from a file of more than 150,000 maintained by the state’s Board of Registered Nurses. The firm said screening questions were used to verify their employment and 59% of those interviewed were not a member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
Most of the nurses surveyed said they are dissatisfied with the “influence they have in their workplace’s decisions that affect their job and work life” and 69% say they don’t trust their workplace to keep its promises.
“There is strong agreement with positive statements about unions,” the poll said. “Eight-in-ten nurses agree that it would be more effective to approach management as a united group and six-in-ten agree that they would feel more comfortable raising workplace problems with management through a union rather than on their own.”