There’s critical health care legislation before the Maryland Senate and its Finance Committee that deserves our support. It’s Senate Bill 720/House Bill 905: The Safe Staffing Act of 2025. It takes key steps to be sure that adequate staff at all levels are in Maryland hospitals to provide care.

As a career emergency room doctor, I’ve worked in rural, suburban and urban hospitals across Maryland, doing day shifts, evening shifts, night shifts, weekends and holidays over 40 years. The problems of sufficient staffing have been present from the start of my career here, but these have become significantly worse in the past decade.

This has led to a host of problems, including extended ER wait times, adverse outcomes for patients, stress on families and burnout for clinicians. When I was in the House of Delegates, legislation requiring specific staffing ratios was introduced, and I generally opposed these because they did not allow for staffing flexibility and collaboration with hospital administration.

SB720/HB905 takes a different approach, and that’s why so many stakeholders, including physicians (the Maryland State Medical Society, MedChi), support this bill. It’s essential to have frontline workers’ perspectives on staffing included in hospital planning, and that’s exactly what this bill does. The legislation creates a process for this to happen, and it would help guide hospital staffing plans and ultimately improve patient care.

Hospitals should not have objections to this bill as amended. In fact, it will help them. And, frankly, if everything hospitals represent as being done was working, we wouldn’t be having these conversations now, and we would not be seeing the crisis of care that grips Maryland hospitals every hour of every day.

The House has passed its version, so it’s up to the Senate, particularly the Senate Finance Committee, to bring the bill up for a vote. If this makes sense to you, now is the time to contact your state legislators.

Dr. Dan Morhaim is a former Maryland state delegate.