Viewpoints: Defining ‘Affordable’; Louisiana’s Innovative Medicaid Expansion Approach

Slate:
Lightening Nurses’ Loads

Hotel rooms have occupancy limits, as do elevators, and even taxi cabs in New York City, but few laws in the United States regulate or even monitor the number of patients that any one hospital nurse can be responsible for at a given time. This hit home for me after the publication of my book The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives. Many nurses reacted by reminding me that four patients is a cakewalk, not worth writing a book about—their usual load is eight patients or more. (Theresa Brown, 5/10)