Albany Medical Center Hospital on Nov. 26, 2024.

Albany Medical Center's bill has come due at last: The hospital will pay the state $375,000 to settle violations of New York’s safe staffing law.

“This agreement reinforces the importance of timely compliance with staffing requirements and helps ensure that hospitals are accountable to both their workers and the patients they serve,” said James McDonald, commissioner of the state Department of Health.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

We’re glad to see Albany Med held to account. Even more important, we hope to see patient care held to the highest standards. However, let’s take a moment to look at the three priorities mentioned in that statement -- timely compliance, accountability to workers and accountability to patients – because neither the state nor the hospital has much to crow about here.

The goal of the 2021 safe staffing law is to ensure patients are well cared-for by requiring facilities to have enough caregivers on each shift. Hospitals form committees to make their own plans, and once those plans receive state approval, the facilities must follow them. And the public is supposed to be able to know whether staffing goals are being met.

Nurses at Albany Med sounded warnings almost from the beginning that some shifts were chronically short-staffed, in........

© Times Union