At SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, patients are at risk — not because of a lack of dedicated nurses, but because there simply aren't enough of them.

Nurses at St. Mary's say they are regularly forced to care for more patients than is safe, leaving little time for the kind of attention every patient deserves. 

One nurse described a staffing situation so thin that she is often the most experienced nurse on her floor. "I've called the whole hospital being like, 'Can somebody tell me how to solve this problem, because this has never been a problem for me?' And I'm the one who knows the most here," she said. "And that's so scary."

This isn't just a workplace problem — it's a patient safety crisis. When nurses are stretched too thin, patients receive less monitoring, less education about their conditions, and less basic care. Chronic understaffing fuels burnout and turnover, which makes the problem worse over time.

More than 70 percent of St. Mary's 870 registered nurses — over 600 people — have signed authorization cards calling for a union election, hoping that collective bargaining will give them a real voice in staffing decisions. They aren't asking to leave. They want to stay and fix the problem from the inside.

SSM Health has said it is committed to providing exceptional patient care. We're asking them to prove it. Adequate nurse staffing isn't just a labor issue — it's the foundation of safe, humane healthcare.

Sign this petition to call on SSM Health leadership to commit to evidence-based nurse-to-patient staffing ratios at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison.