There are many critical nursing priorities that nurses need to address in Congress, and many members of Congress favor changing legislation to protect the rights of nurses across the country. The American Nurses Association - ANA - has proposed that more attention be paid to prioritizing specific nursing legislation to protect the nursing profession. At a time when COVID-19 has wreaked such havoc on the number of nurses hospitals can count on, not being entitled to job security or not having access to compensation when they are injured can be a terrible trigger that weighs even more heavily on the fine net on which the healthcare system is held together.
Through Nursa, we recognize that nurses need to feel safe in their work environment and that different laws and legislation can significantly protect them and their patients. The most important underlying issue in the legislation for nurses is the protection of patient care, which must be safeguarded to ensure the safety of society. Some of the ANA updates that have been discussed recently are:
- H. R.1195 The workplace violence prevention for healthcare and social service workers act. This section describes the need to decrease workplace violence toward nurses, which was rising in 2019 and 2021. It was confirmed in a survey of nurses who experienced an increase in violence, with many agreeing that visitor restrictions caused the violence, changes in the hospital's patient population, and the decrease in healthcare staffing and of nurses in general. To prevent the frequency and severity of violent incidents in the workplace, a workplace violence prevention standard should be implemented, which should, among other things, be reviewed frequently by employers, be situation-specific, ensure that there is always effective violence reporting processes in place, and mandate a prompt response to any incident, large or small.
- S. 4182, which comes as a companion to H.R. 1195, to prevent extreme violence. When introduced, it had a great deal of approval from the nursing sector, which feels very vulnerable because of the number of dangers to the entire healthcare sector in the country, which sometimes feels that they cannot work safely and the feeling that they could lose their lives at any time or suffer violence. One of the suggested improvements is that employers should be held accountable when an act of violence occurs in the workplace, whether in a hospital or a healthcare facility. It is supported by statistics that healthcare workers and society urgently need these laws to be passed in Congress.
- R.8812, recently introduced, proposes improving care and access to nurses, which will remove the need in rural areas for physicians to accompany highly trained nurses during anesthesia and other medical procedures, with particular emphasis on certified registered nurse anesthetists to access Medicaid services. This will allow hospital costs to be tremendously reduced for patients, incrementing access to nursing services and restoring nurses' confidence as it was during the pandemic.
- R. 851/S. 246, called the FAAN act, or future advancement of academic nursing, calls for action on further education of nurses nationwide, continuing education of the nursing profession, as well as modernizing current nursing education programs and increasing the number of faculty for nursing programs, and is alarmingly essential to curb the nursing shortage facing the country at this critical time.
- R.6087, which would amend the law to allow nurse practitioners (NPs) to dispense treatment to federal workers and certify disabilities without necessarily having to seek a physician for treatment, to begin treating injuries as soon as possible in a less costly and effective manner.
- R. 7666 seeks to dispense life-saving buprenorphine to opioid addicts rather than having to apply duplicative for permission to use it.
In all of these bills that Congress will be considering for passage in 2023 and 2024, it is also considering extending the special permits that were issued during the pandemic to improve the quality of care until 2024 while also seeking to have many of those that improved response time implemented permanently.
What is the Current Nurse Legislation in Congress?
Many laws about nurses need to be improved in Congress, whether it is to ensure the safety of patients, the safety of nurses, or to improve the quality and affordability of care for patients and to make access to health care more universal. Currently, in Congress, legislation is being voted on to improve all of these processes with a common goal: to improve care for all patients in the country and to ensure a better life for all. Without a doubt, nurses deserve to see Congress pass any law that will protect them and allow them to improve.
