Nursing a Grudge

Dressed in hospital scrubs and practical shoes, they've crashed speeches and fundraisers from the West Coast to the East. They staged a mock funeral with coffins and a New Orleans-style jazz band in front of the state Capitol. One even snagged a ticket to a movie screening attended by the governor, only to be whisked away and later questioned by one of his bodyguards. When she asked why she posed a threat, the bodyguard told her, "You were wearing a nursing uniform." Yikes!

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger triggered the protests when he issued an emergency order suspending a new law -- hard won after years of lobbying by the nurses union -- requiring more nurses in hospital wards and emergency rooms. With his usual swagger, Schwarzenegger dismissed the protesting nurses as just one of many "special interests" who don't like him because "I am always kicking their butts."

It turns out they kicked his. A Superior Court judge earlier this month ruled that the governor had misused the emergency order and had no authority to suspend the law.

This would all be amusing if it were not a distraction from the real horror story -- a nationwide nursing shortage that is particularly severe in California and that will grow worse as aging nurses retire faster than they can be replaced. The governor and the nurses need to put aside posturing and work together or the state's already precarious healthcare system will be short an estimated 70,000 nurses by 2020.

California last year became the first state in the nation to require minimum staffing ratios for hospital nurses. Signed into law five years earlier by then-Gov. Gray Davis, the ratios were to be phased in over several years. As of last year, for example, medical-surgical wards had to have one nurse for every six patients. In January, that ratio was supposed to drop to one for every five patients.

Many hospital officials claim that the ratios are overly rigid and could push some hospitals, already squeezed by managed care, cuts in federal aid and soaring numbers of uninsured, to close. Even those that could afford to hire more staff might have to shut departments and turn patients away because of the nursing shortage.