Jill Furillo is an emergency room nurse from California. But she’s also the national bargaining director for the largest nurses union in North America: National Nurses United. She was in Moose Jaw Wednesday to talk to the Saskatchewan Nurses Union (SUN) about hospital staffing ratios.
“What ratios are is really the number of patients nurses will be responsible for on a daily basis,” said Furillo. “If the number of patients that nurses are responsible for increases, it becomes more difficult to give safe care.”
She stood in front of around 300 SUN members talking about the fight in California to obtain legislated staffing ratios in a health care system that bases itself more on profit than patient care.
“Your system is not based on profit, and our system is all about profit,” she said. “Nurses in California admire and dream of having a health care system like you have in Canada.”
But according to Rosalee Longmoore, President of SUN, the staffing ratio issue still applies to Canadian hospitals.
For more on this story, read an upcoming edition of the Times-Herald.
