Nurses with the Minnesota Nurses Association gathered with lawmakers at the State Capitol to address comments made by Mayo Clinic last Friday. In an email obtained by private media, the hospital threatened to pull a multi-billion-dollar investment if the legislature passes two healthcare-related pieces of legislation, NBC affiliate KTTC reports.
One of those bills is the so-called “Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act,” which aims to give nurses around the state a say in staffing and recruiting levels by creating committees and other provisions. The hospital proposed exemptions that would effectively exempt most hospitals statewide from the law.
“At the 11th hour, Mayo Clinic Health Systems is attempting to ignore… the growing list of reports that are showing nurses are leaving our profession in droves,” said MNA 1st Vice President Chris Rubesch, “Corporate health executives like those at the Mayo Clinic don’t want to face the hard truth. That is the unsafe profit driven staffing reductions that they are implementing that is causing this staffing crisis.”
The comments from Mayo come as the law has already moved through both the House and Senate as part of the Health and Human Services Omnibus Bill. That bill is currently in conference committee, a time usually reserved for ironing out differences between the two versions of the bill in the House and Senate.
Lawmakers called the “Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act” a collaborative process with bipartisan support.
