by Grace FriedmanMedill Illinois News Bureau, Capitol News Illinois
SPRINGFIELD — Health care unions continue to rally for legislation to address understaffing they say strains hospitals and threatens both patient safety and staff well-being.
Lawmakers are considering the Hospital Worker Staff and Safety bill, which would establish mandatory nurse-to-patient staffing ratios and increase support for underfunded hospitals.
The proposed legislation, Senate Bill 21 and House Bill 3512, aims to establish minimum staffing ratios in hospitals and fund critical safety-net hospitals across the state. Advocates with health care worker unions have been holding a series of rallies at the Capitol in support of the legislation in recent weeks.
Gant, who has worked at Ingalls Hospital for nearly 30 years, says she has watched many of her colleagues quit due to the mental and physical toll the short staffing has had on their bodies.
“This is an opportunity for legislators to hear us, to know that these hospitals are not safe.” Gant said.
But similar versions of the proposed legislation have been introduced at the Statehouse for recent years and have failed to gain traction. Generally backed by unions representing nurses, such as the Service Employees International Union, previous staffing ratio measures have run into opposition from hospital groups that say they’re unworkable.
The proposed legislation filed this year has yet to receive a hearing in a substantive committee, meaning it will be an uphill battle for it to move by the time the legislature adjourns at the end of the month.
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“This bill gives you a real voice,” Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, said to rallygoers. “It gives you a way to speak up when things are unsafe for you and the people who you care for.”
However, not all lawmakers are convinced that now is the right time to implement staffing ratios.
“You can mandate the staffing ratios, but if those professionals don’t exist, what have you really done?” said Rep. Norine Hammond, R-Macomb. “We’ve been trying for years to get more people into the health care field, especially after COVID, and we’re just not there yet.”
Hammond expressed concern that enforcing strict staffing requirements without enough qualified workers in the pipeline could place unrealistic burdens on hospitals. She warned that such mandates might unintentionally strain facilities already struggling with labor shortages and lead to adverse financial consequences, especially for smaller or rural hospitals.
Hospital trade groups echo those concerns, calling the legislation unworkable, burdensome and an ineffective way to solve a problem that should be addressed by the specific needs of each hospital or care center. The Illinois Health and Hospital Association, the Association of Safety Net Community Hospitals and the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network issued a statement saying they strongly oppose HB 3512.
They said it was introduced “as a backdoor effort pushed by organized labor to impose unworkable, government-imposed health care staffing ratios in Illinois.”
“This proposal would relegate the essential, complex and nuanced protocols established to safely and efficiently staff a hospital 24/7/365, to a series of burdensome forms and onerous paperwork that hospitals would be required to submit to the (IDPH) to establish minimum staffing standards for every hospital worker, in each hospital unit,” the groups said in the statement.
Still, according to a recent Service Employees International Union survey of Chicago area hospital workers, 70% of respondents reported understaffing, and over 25% reported unsafe or unmanageable workloads. Additionally, in the same survey, 47% of the respondents stated an intent to leave their jobs soon.
To help enforce safety standards, the legislation introduces “assignment despite objection forms” that give hospital workers the opportunity to document and report any assignments that they believe are unsafe. Hospitals are then required to provide this information to IDPH, which would have to publish an annual report on all these staffing metrics. The legislation would also require IDPH to “make recommendations for minimum staffing standards for hospital workers in each hospital unit.”
In addition to protecting staff, advocates said this bill would allocate proper essential resources to underfunded hospitals around the state, including Mount Sinai Hospital on Chicago's West Side, a Level 1 trauma center that helps underserved and violence-impacted communities.
“Mount Sinai saved my son's life,” said Sonya Brown, who traveled from Chicago to Springfield recently to advocate for the safety-net hospital that treated her son after he was shot seven times in 2020.
“He was shot in the head, he was shot in the neck, he was shot in the chest, the abdomen and shoulder, and the arm,” Brown said. “If they wouldn't have gotten to him in time, he would have died.”
Mount Sinai serves as a health care provider for communities on both the South and West sides of Chicago, areas that experience some of Chicago's highest rates of gun violence. If the hospitals are not protected by measures in this legislation, advocates said, the victims in these neighborhoods risk longer travel times to alternative trauma centers.
They said the bills would help allocate essential resources and enforce staffing standards at safety-net hospitals to continue effectively serving vulnerable communities.
“All of our staff is overworked,” said Jessica Mendoza, a nursing assistant at Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital in Hines. “A lot of our veterans are coming into the VA to get help with their health, but we do not have the staff to provide it.”
Mendoza, who has worked at the Hines VA Hospital for nearly two years, said that due to the low number of staff, they rarely get a break. She noted that the lack of sufficient staffing makes it difficult to provide the level of care that the veterans need.
The health care workers and advocates gathering in Springfield at the recent rally emphasized that without sufficient staffing and resources, the quality of patient care throughout Illinois hospitals will continue declining, and worker burnout will escalate.
“They expect you to do the job of five or six people but pay you for one.” Sen. Lakesia Collins, D-Chicago, said at the rally. Prior to joining the General Assembly, Collins was a CNA in nursing homes.
As the legislation stagnates at the Capitol, hospital workers and advocates said they plan to keep organizing and sharing their stories. They said they're calling on lawmakers to prioritize frontline health care workers and the patients who depend on them.
Grace Friedman is a student in the Medill Illinois News Bureau, a program at the Medill School of Journalism that provides local news outlets with state legislature and government coverage. She can be reached at gracefriedman2025@u.northwestern.edu.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Years ago, our church group was out Christmas caroling. We weren't far from the church and our leader led us out to the back of Mr. Castle's house to sing to he and his wife. His wife came to the door and greeted us with a smile and was gracious.
We sang to her when suddenly through the window we saw her husband appear in the family room with a big towel around his body. He obviously had just gotten out of the shower. He came into his family room unknowing that 20 carolers had all eyes on him. Several of the women began to chuckle. I just knew we were all about to see something we had not planned on.
Sitting down on his sofa he put his feet up and was preparing to relax. The volume of laughter from a couple of his adult friends grew louder when Mr. Castle looked up and saw us. He immediately made an "Oh no" expression while shaking his head a bit and jumped up and departed to another part of the house.
We sang to his sweet wife and moved on down the street with a new visual that I still remember to this day. I'll always remember what a good spirit he and his wife had and that we all left feeling uplifted by them.
This week I walked to the back of a local nursing home to look through a window to see a friend. Ms. Southard is 99.
My wife and I visited in her home recently. She was agile, mentally sharp and dancing around like she always does. Her attitude always lifts us up. She did say on that very day we were there, "I don't want to end up in a nursing home. I told my son I don't ever want to be in one."
Two weeks later while closing her curtains she made an awkward step, fell and broke her leg. Surgery was required and also rehabilitation. Her insurance plan would not pay for her to go to the local rehabilitation hospital but instead put her where she never wanted to be, a nursing home.
I found out from a nurse which room she was in and how to find the right window to look through. The nurse said she would meet me at the window and let Ms. Southard know I was there. I dreaded what I might see but wanted to wish her a Merry Christmas. Knocking on the window I was delighted that she was sitting up and started laughing and waving at me. We exchanged Merry Christmas the best we could yelling through a window. While I almost wanted to cry seeing her there, I was so encouraged by her good spirit.
The spirit of Christmas is inside you. This spirit is greater than you and I and pulls us through the awkward and the very difficult times of life.
The Christmas season we celebrate is one of hope and celebration. The story of Jesus is the story of God's hope coming to us in the little baby a long time ago.
2020 has certainly been a year we've needed hope. Vaccines for Covid-19 are coming and 2021 is going to be a better year.
May your spirit be rekindled. Share your spirit with others and may the year ahead be one of the best ever for us all.
