Hospitals and other medical personnel in Georgia are legally required to report nurses who have substance abuse problems or who make medical errors that endanger patients, lawmakers decided this week.
The General Assembly passed such a law last year but only this week agreed to fund it — and only then with money that the Secretary of State had squirreled away for another purpose.
Under the law, such reports would go the state nursing board, which already has a backlog of disciplinary complaints. The Secretary of State’s office, which oversees most of the state’s professional boards, is unhappy that money it was saving for technology improvements will be funneled instead to the nursing board.
But advocates for nurses were pleased. “We’re feeling pretty good about it,” said Debbie Hackman, CEO of the Georgia Nurses Association.
The state budget agreement hammered out Tuesday includes $6.9 million for the Professional Licensing Boards, which are administered by Secretary of State Brian Kemp. The boards regulate industries from barbers to librarians, but the largest of them is the Georgia Board of Nursing, which licenses nearly 150,000 registered and licensed practical nurses across the state.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in July the nursing board takes an average of 15 months to decide disciplinary cases for nurses, most of whom have been accused of stealing and abusing narcotics. As a result of the delay, the board has more than 3,000 open disciplinary cases, many several years old.
Board president Barry Cranfill, a nurse himself, has complained that the state does not properly fund the board and stymies its efforts to deal quickly with drug-addicted nurses.
In the fiscal 2015 budget, lawmakers instructed Kemp’s office to use about $600,000 in “reserves” to fund the mandatory reporting law. Provided the nursing board’s operating budget remains stable, the additional funding would represent a 30 percent increase.
House Health and Human Services Chairwoman Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, said the budget instructions are not a cure but a good start.
“They are going to have to have some staff and investigators,” Cooper, who is also a nurse, said. “I would hope this $600,000 would allow them to build the infrastructure.”
Cranfill said he is glad the Legislature recognized the problem, but he is not convinced the money will be used to pay for the mandatory reporting requirement. It may end up, he said, being used instead “for normal operating expenses as opposed to the intended purpose.”
“Although this one-time funding is a step in the right direction, the (board) still maintains that the proper, appropriate and sustainable solution is to establish the board as an independent budget unit,” he said.
The idea of moving the board out from the Secretary of State’s office draws on examples from outside Georgia. Other states — notably North Carolina — have independent boards that perform better than Georgia’s nursing board.
Kemp is not entirely happy with the budget and had preferred Gov. Nathan Deal’s original proposal, which had a nearly $160,000 budget increase and did not touch the office’s reserves. In fact, Kemp’s office disputes lawmakers’ description of the $1 million as reserves, calling it “a mischaracterization.”
“Reserves are state general funds that are appropriated and left over at the end of the fiscal year,” said Jared Thomas, Kemp’s spokesman. “For our agency, this is usually about 1-2 percent of our total appropriation and it is statutorily returned to the (treasury) at the fiscal year’s end.”
What the Legislature has targeted is “retained revenue,” money brought in through fees that Kemp’s office has been storing away to pay for technology upgrades, Thomas said.
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