Harrisburg, Dauphin County — After being on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic for more than a year, nurses are memorializing the lives lost in Pennsylvania due to the pandemic and calling on change within healthcare systems.

1,000 white roses laid on the steps of the Capitol Monday morning, each one put there by the hands of a frontline hero and representing 25 Pennsylvanians lost to COVID-19, for a total of 25,000 lives gone.

“When I look at the roses, I think of the patients that I cared for,” Lehigh Valley Hospital – Pocono and CTVL President Annmarie Ruggiero says. “This shows the pain that we’re feeling.”

These nurses are advocating for the Patient Safety Act, introduced by Representative Tom Mehaffie and Representative K.C. Tomlinson, which focuses on inadequate staffing in hospitals and nursing homes. The bill was introduced prior to the pandemic, but advocates say COVID-19 has highlighted how stretched thin nurses are – and the burnout they’re experiencing with a nurse-to-patient ratio of 1 to 5 in some locations.

“It’s compassion fatigue,” says Michelle Boyle, a nurse with Nurses of PA. “We were losing nurses before COVID because of the heartbreak of not being able to be in two rooms in time.”

“No one wants to be a number in a hospital,” explains Hershey Medical Center Registered Nurse Maureen Casey. “They want to know they’re going to be taken care of and it’s going to be missed because their nurse was busy with another patient.”

“That’s what they need us for, all right, they need us to provide that, to assess that to give them, the care to look at them critically, to anticipate probably what their next need will be,” Ruggiero continues.

While nurses say colleagues are leaving the field because of being stretched too thin, some legislators disagree.

“They want RNs to be the only solution,” says Chair of the Subcommittee on Healthcare and Member of the Health Committee Representative Paul Schemel. “Hospitals might use different kinds of nursing, different kinds of staff, so to say ‘Our only model is this one model’ and, what do you know, it’s a model that utilizes the highest utilization of trained RNs, therefore increases the opportunity that they have for employment, increases their wages.”

The conflict remaining, and standing in the way of the bill getting passed, is who is better suited to understand staffing: institutions or caretakers, like doctors and nurses?

“It’s a competing interest between the two,” Representative Schemel says. “Obviously hospitals want to be able to right-size or staffing, there are different kinds of nurses they might have, they might not want to have as many RN nurses, they might fill that in with other kinds of staff nurses.”

Representative Schemel says he trusts institutions to make the best decision for their individual facilities. When asked if he thinks the quality of care for patients diminishes when a nurse is taking care of 5 to 6 patients, he says, “I don’t think there’s a way to independently evaluate that. It’s a one size fits all solution.”