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Nurses urge guardrails: AI should augment bedside care, not be used to cut staffing
Summary
A union leader and frontline nurses told legislators AI must return caregivers to patients, require human‑in‑the‑loop safeguards, transparency and consent, and not be a pretext to increase patient loads or reduce staffing.
Lori Kreider, vice president of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania and a registered nurse at Penn State Hershey, told the joint committee that nurses welcome tools that remove paperwork but warned against using AI to justify larger patient loads or replace hands‑on care.
"AI can be a powerful copilot, but it must never be the pilot," Kreider said, urging legislators to enshrine human‑in‑the‑loop standards, mandatory transparency about how AI reaches recommendations, and patient notice and consent when AI is used in care. She described recent capacity pressure at Hershey Medical Center, with beds operating at full capacity, and argued that efficiency must not become a cover for abandonment of in‑person care.
Kreider said unions are negotiating contract language to give frontline workers a voice in implementation and called for labor‑management committees to oversee new patient‑care technology. She also asked that big tech companies building data centers in the state shoulder tax responsibilities to help the hospitals where their software is deployed.
Committee members pressed for specifics about frontline training and whether AI had caused job loss. Kreider said she was not aware of bedside positions eliminated because of AI and emphasized that the immediate priority is more nurses at the bedside and better staffing ratios.
The testimony added a workforce and patient‑safety dimension to the committee’s inquiry, placing labor protections and consent procedures alongside the governance and technical validation hospitals described earlier.
