On November 20 and 21, 2008, New Jersey RNs Working Together hosted two, one-day conferences on “Safety in Numbers.” Over 200 local nurses from five unions came to learn about two very important pieces of legislation for New Jersey’s nurses — The Staffing Disclosure Act, signed into law in January 2005, and a nurse-to-patient ratio bill, introduced into the 212^th New Jersey Legislature in 2006 by Senators Joseph Vitale and Loretta Weinberg that would mandate safer nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals.

Special guest speakers included Suzanne Gordon, author of Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care, who described how nurses in California and Australia have fought for and won ratio bills. Barbara Blake, RN, State Secretary of United Nurses Associations of California/NUHHCE (AFSCME), added a nurse’s perspective on how the implementation process for ratios played out in California to make California’s hospitals safer places to work.

Participants also heard from Jo Ann Pietro, a registered nurse and a law partner at Wahrenberger & Pietro and Alison Gibson and Sharon Sedlak from the Health Care Quality Assessment Unit of the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services.

For more information on the implementation of New Jersey’s Staffing Disclosure Act, and for reporting instructions, forms and memorandums, click here. To see the full text or co-sponsors for New Jersey’s staffing ratio bill, click here.