Bills ending mandatory overtime and requiring employers to institute safe patient-lifting procedures are before the General Assembly.

01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 23, 2006

BY ELIZABETH GUDRAIS
Journal State House Bureau

PROVIDENCE -- Health-care workers advocated yesterday at the State House for two measures they claim will greatly increase their quality of life and their ability to treat patients safely.

They seek an end to mandatory overtime for nurses, a practice they say hospitals abuse, leading to exhausted, error-prone nurses.

And they want health-care facilities to put in place "safe patient-handling" policies to protect nurses from injury due to heavy lifting.

The mandatory-overtime bill would prohibit health-care facilities from requiring employees to accept work of more than an agreed to, predetermined scheduled shift of 8, 10 or 12 hours. A facility could be fined up to $300 per violation, and could ultimately have its license revoked. It would take effect next March.

Carmen Cadotte, a mental-health worker at Butler Hospital, testified that from April 1 of last year through yesterday, the hospital "froze" 534 shifts for mental-health workers -- that is, directed a worker to stay and work an extra eight-hour shift 534 times.

"We really do try to have a life outside of work, and this really makes it hard," Cadotte said. "We're running on empty, and yet we're caring for your loved ones."

The only way to ensure hospitals find alternatives to mandatory overtime is to force them, health-care workers' advocates testified.

"It's cheaper to pay an existing RN overtime than to hire an additional RN," said Gary T. Gentile, general counsel to the National Association of Government Employees, which represents health-care workers employed by the state departments of Health, Retardation and Hospitals, Children, Youth and Families, and Health.

Westerly Hospital uses mandatory overtime very rarely -- just once in the last four years -- the hospital's employees testified. Instead, they said the hospital uses pay incentives, a shift-bidding system and sometimes traveling nurses to ensure shifts get filled.

"When you have a good manager, you have very little mandatory overtime," Jan Salsich, president of the hospital's nurses' union, said. "If there's a law, they will be required to do their job and treat us fairly."

Outside the legislative chambers, representatives of companies that manufacture lifting equipment demonstrated their wares. Rep. Grace Diaz, D-Providence, tried one of the devices, sitting in a harness while the machine lifted her from a sitting to a standing position.

Diaz is one of the sponsors of the Safe Patient Handling Act of 2006. Her bill would require every licensed health-care facility to establish a safe patient-handling program with the goal of eliminating the practice of lifting and transferring patients by hand. Facilities' certificates of need -- a requirement for renovation or expansion -- would be tied to their providing space and infrastructure, such as ceiling tracks, for lifting equipment.

The bill backs up the arguments with numbers: The average nurse lifts 1.8 tons per shift. More than a third of health-care workers suffer a work-related back injury during their career. Using modern lifting equipment drastically reduces the incidence of injury.

Diaz has firsthand knowledge of on-the-job injury. While working in a nursing home, she hurt her back helping to lift a patient who weighed 250 pounds and was out of for work three months, she said.

"When you work in these facilities, you expose yourself to injury, and you also expose the patient," Diaz said.

This is the fourth straight year a bill to ban mandatory overtime, sponsored by Rep. Raymond E. Gallison Jr., D-Bristol, and Sen. John J. Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, has been introduced.

Sen. Rhoda E. Perry, D-Providence, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, said the Safe Patient Handling Act -- sponsored by Diaz in the House and V. Susan Sosnowski, D-South Kingstown, in the Senate -- is new this year.

Each measure was heard in a House committee and a Senate committee yesterday; the committees took no votes yesterday on either.

egudrais@projo.com / (401) 277-7045