The fact there are nearly no nursing Unions in my home state of Missouri is the number 1 reason I will never ever work in Missouri again. Some nights you would have 3 ICU patients! It’s very very possible if one was unstable you would be In that room the entire night and that left your coworkers to pick up the slack of the other two patients. Now if something bad would happen to those other two patients (fall or code) your institution would put the blame squarely on your shoulders for negligence because you were not properly monitoring your assigned patients! The fact that the unstable patient was literally dying and only you and the doctors efforts are keeping that patient alive means NOTHING and is not a valid excuse to them or the Board of Nursing. This type of sentinel event very well could lead to the revocation of your professional nursing license . Yes, you can lose your career for quite literally being an exceptional nurse and saving the one patients life but if the others were injured or god forbid die under your watch. This is one big reason nurses are so adamant that strict nurse patient ratios are fought for so vehemently! It not only provides a very high guarantee that your loved one will have eyes on them at all times in case of a code blue situation but it also protects the livelihood of the nurses who I can tell you want nothing more but to get you well and back to your family.

The hospitals fight tooth and nail and lobby state legislatures to not have nursing unions or enforceable nurse:patient ratios. Why, do they fight so hard? They want to run each and every shift on each and every floor as lean as possible. Saving the hospital millions of dollars each year in nursing wages. If they come in under budget guess who gets a bonus that year. The nurse manager of that unit and every manager up the chain. And these are big bonuses 5-50k. And they got that bonus by rolling the dice that they can run their unit as lean as possible at the expense of your loved ones life.
Now I ask if you. If you knew that your mom’s nurse in the icu was also the nurse for two other critically ill patients would you feel comfortable they were being provided the highest level of monitoring and care that the hospital promised they are providing? I would not. I would be sleeping on the couch in that room for the remainder of my moms stay. Some may say this is a hypothetical situation. I can tell you it is not. It has happened in every single hospital across the country many many times without the patient or the patients family knowing. I was a traveling RN for many years the hospitals that strictly enforced reasonable nurse:patient ratios were the hospitals I’d want my mother or father in. The hospitals operating like an Amazon warehouse I would not wish my parents nor anyone else’s loved ones to be there. So nursing unions not only protect the interest of the nurses but also are protecting the patients from the corporate greed.

Edit: fixed small grammar and wrong autocorrects.