We worked on six bills today.
H.F. 588, the bill on nurse staffing, has received a lot of attention this year. The bill has changed since its introduction, the version today is a compromise agreed to by the Nurses Association and the Hospital Association.
This bill requires hospitals to develop core staffing plans for all of their units, and then submit these plans to the Minnesota Hospital Association. The MHA will then publish these plans on the Association’s Hospital Quality Report website.
In addition, the Department of Health is required to convene a working group that will use the staffing plan information and other available data to study the correlation between nurse staffing levels and patient outcomes. This bill passed on a 73-58 vote.