Rep. Sean Quinlan on patient-nurse ratios, tourism and transparency

This post is part of our Capitol Connections series, where Annalisa Burgos sits down with state lawmakers to discuss their priorities for the legislative session and issues affecting their districts. Watch the full interview above and click here for more Capitol Connections.

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - State House Majority Leader Rep. Sean Quinlan, who represents Oahu’s North shore communities, said he plans to take up the issue of patient-nurse ratios this session to prevent future strikes and lockouts.

It comes amid a wave of labor contract disputes over hospital staffing.

“We’re still looking to improve healthcare outcomes so I’m looking at a sort of a pared down version of last year’s nurse staffing ratios,“ he explained. ”The reality is in a lot of different units in our hospitals, we have too many patients for too few nurses, and we’re seeing a lot of burnout and we’re seeing bad outcomes because one nurse can’t necessarily, at the end of a 12 hour shift, juggle all these patients."

“It’s really important for the future health of our healthcare system that we come up with a way that we can retain nurses, that patients are safer, and that we don’t run into a situation 10-15 years from now where we have this wave of retirements and we don’t have enough nurses to replace them because we have an aging population,” Quinlan added.

“We just have to compromise somewhere between the nurses’ position and the healthcare system’s position, and I think that would be better for all of us.”

Quinlan says he’s also working to balance Hawaii’s need for tourism dollars and overcrowding in communities.

“We tend to take tourism for granted. We just think, well, it’s always been there. It’ll always be there. But the industry is more fragile than people think, and I know that especially on the North Shore of Oahu, people are often very unhappy with the level of tourism, and I think we have to be mindful of, not just the jobs that tourism creates, but also the revenues. But more importantly than that, we have to be mindful of the impact on communities.“

“We are working on the North Shore on efforts to guide visitors to park and ride shuttle systems. You know, we’re we’re improving the parking lot at Lanikea. We’re getting a bypass road, and we’re trying to replicate the model they use on the north shore of Kauai where it’s very easy and simple to say visitors come in. They pay lots of money. We tax them and we manage flows of money. But what we haven’t done ever in the history of Hawaii until recently on the north shore of Hawaii is we haven’t managed flows of people, and that’s what we have to start doing to provide relief and improve quality of life for those communities that have been most impacted by the visitor industry, but also the ones that are contributing the most.”

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