Nurses Sue Gov. Over Staffing

The California Nurses Assn. sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday, seeking to reverse his order last month delaying until 2008 a requirement for additional nurses in hospital medical and surgical units.

The suit alleges Schwarzenegger acted illegally in suspending requirements set to take effect Jan. 1 that there be one nurse for every five patients in those units, instead of one for every six. Schwarzenegger agreed with hospitals that the mandate was too costly because it would have forced them to hire more nurses.

Nurses have staged several protests since, including one Dec. 8 in Long Beach at the 18th annual California Governor’s Conference on Women and Families. Schwarzenegger dismissed the protesters as “special interests [who] don’t like me in Sacramento because I’m always kicking their butts,” prompting more outrage from the nurses.

The suit, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, alleges Republican Schwarzenegger and the Department of Health Services illegally overturned a 1999 law signed by Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, and are endangering patient safety.

Schwarzenegger’s office referred calls to the Health and Human Services Agency, which referred calls to the Department of Health Services.

“Nowhere in the law does it say specifically what those ratios should be,” said department spokesman Ken August. “We set in place ratios that are safe currently” and will maintain them while they study the cost and need for more nurses.

In addition to providing safe care, he said the department must ensure hospitals don’t close their doors because the cost of providing additional nurses is too great.

The law was intended to prevent hospitals from basing staff decisions on financial considerations, the very reasoning Schwarzenegger’s administration used in justifying the delay, said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the 57,000-member association.

What’s more, “it just sets a horrendous precedent,” she said. “He did an end run around the Legislature. Left unchallenged, he could do that on numerous regulations.”

The administration’s delay had nothing to do with profits, but rather a nursing shortage that would sap care from nursing homes and other facilities to feed the need at hospitals, said Jan Emerson, spokeswoman for the California Healthcare Assn., which represents 400 California hospitals.