Adds home care visits to existing provisions of law prohibiting health care employers from requiring a nurse to work more than such nurse's regularly scheduled work hours, including regularly scheduled home care visits.
Summary
This bill amends the Labor Law and Education Law to extend New York’s existing nurse overtime protections to home care settings. It adds “regularly scheduled home care visits” to the definition of a nurse’s regularly scheduled work hours and to the rule that health care employers may not require nurses to work beyond those hours. The bill also clarifies that a nurse’s refusal to work beyond regularly scheduled hours, including home care visits, does not by itself constitute patient abandonment or neglect, except in the limited circumstances already recognized in the Labor Law.
The measure is aimed at registered professional nurses and licensed practical nurses who provide direct patient care, and it applies to health care employers operating in facilities covered by the Public Health Law, Mental Hygiene Law, Education Law, Correction Law, and certain executive law facilities. By expressly including home care visits, the bill would close a gap in current overtime and abandonment protections for nurses working outside traditional facility settings. It would take effect 90 days after becoming law.
Impact
The bill would amend Labor Law section 167 and Education Law section 6510-e to expressly include home care visits within the scope of nurse overtime protections and the related abandonment/neglect safeguard. In practical terms, home care agencies and other covered health care employers could not treat a nurse’s scheduled home care visits as outside the statutory limits on required work hours, and nurses could refuse extra work beyond those scheduled visits without that refusal alone being deemed abandonment. The change would affect staffing, scheduling, and overtime practices for home care providers and the nurses they employ.
Sentiment
The available context suggests the bill is protective of nurses and generally supportive of labor rights in home care, with the sponsor seeking to align home care work with existing overtime rules for other health care settings. Because there are no committee transcripts or recorded votes provided, there is no documented opposition or formal debate in the supplied materials. The bill’s framing indicates a pro-nurse, patient-safety-oriented purpose rather than a controversial policy shift.
Contention
The main potential point of contention is the operational impact on home care employers, who may face tighter scheduling constraints, possible overtime costs, and staffing challenges if home care visits are treated the same as other regularly scheduled hours. Supporters would likely emphasize nurse protections, patient safety, and consistency across health care settings, while any critics would likely focus on administrative burden and flexibility in home care delivery. No specific objections are recorded in the provided materials.
Same As
Adds home care visits to existing provisions of law prohibiting health care employers from requiring a nurse to work more than such nurse's regularly scheduled work hours, including regularly scheduled home care visits.
Adds home care visits to existing provisions of law prohibiting health care employers from requiring a nurse to work more than such nurse's regularly scheduled work hours, including regularly scheduled home care visits.
Establishes the schedules that work act to provide for a timely, good faith interactive process between employees and employers that includes a discussion of potential schedule changes to meet an employee's needs.
Relates to providing more predictable and stable schedules for employees in low-wage occupations; provides that an employer shall pay an employee for at least 4 hours at the basic minimum hourly wage for each day an employee reports for work as instructed but is given less than four hours of work.