Pennsylvania nurses celebrate bill that limits working hours
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
October 15, 2008
The Pennsylvania legislature passed a bill last week that bans mandatory overtime for nurses and other caregivers, reports The Philadelphia Daily News. Mandatory overtime has been a common practice required of nurses, often forcing them to work a double shift. The bill, which was seven years in the making, will not go into effect until July 1, 2009. This will give facilities that mandate overtime of their nurses to hire additional nurses and caregivers. A shortage of nurses and caregivers is the reason why mandatory overtime is used to begin with, says the article.
Those involved in passing the bill argued that not only was it unfair to nurses and caregivers to require mandatory overtime, but the practice put patients at risk. A 2004 University of Pennsylvania study estimated that the risk of a nurse committing a medical error was three times higher when he or she worked a shift longer than 12.5 hours.
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