Over the past several months, my fellow nurses at Valley Hospital and I were surprised to find ourselves in the middle of a major local news story.

As negotiations between the nurses and hospital technicians at Desert Springs Hospital and Valley Hospital and the hospital executives moved forward, there were certainly many dramatic developments. In December, we were locked out from our jobs. Local and state elected leaders got involved. And marathon negotiations with former gaming executive Phil Satre as mediator finally produced a settlement.

But the drama surrounding the negotiations may have obscured a larger story: Over the past year, nurses in Southern Nevada have joined together to make some important changes that not only improve careers for nurses but we believe will also help improve the quality of health care for everyone in our area.

We believe that when nurses are empowered and have a voice about patient care policies in our hospitals -- including on issues such as staffing levels -- patients get better care.

And it is not just nurses who believe this. For example, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the body set up by the hospital industry itself to provide oversight of medical facilities, has stated that "there is little disagreement ... around the relationship between nurse staffing levels and patient outcomes."

A growing body of research is underlining the link between better patient care outcomes and the quality of nurse staffing in hospitals. Numerous studies have shown that inadequate staffing leads to adverse outcomes for patients, including higher rates of urinary tract infection, pneumonia, shock and upper gastrointestinal bleeding. In the worst case scenario, a patient can face a higher risk of dying while in the hospital if cared for by a nurse who has been assigned too many patients.

In 2006, nurses at several of Las Vegas' major hospital systems decided to join together to make improvements that will help us provide better care and bring more qualified people into the profession.

At Catholic Healthcare West's St. Rose System, HCA's Sunrise Medical Center & Children's Hospital, and Universal Health Services' Desert Springs and Valley facilities, health-care workers saw our contract negotiations as opportunities to advocate for those kinds of improvements.

We made some important steps forward:

-- A voice about staffing levels. At the St. Rose system, nurses won staff-to-patient ratios modeled on the groundbreaking ratios that are now a California standard because of state law. At Sunrise and Children's Hospital, nurses won a commitment from HCA that it will make significant improvements in staffing and the right to hold them accountable if they do not. At Desert Springs and Valley, we won patient-care committees that will allow staff nurses to sit down with nursing executives and a neutral outside facilitator to take on issues such as mandatory overtime and safe staffing. These are all different pathways to the same goal: safe staffing that allows us to deliver quality care. Meanwhile, we will also to continue to explore other avenues for making improvements, including a state law that sets minimum staffing guidelines.

-- Improved pay to recruit and retain more staff. As health-care workers, we enjoy enormously rewarding careers. But we do not get free groceries if we are nurses, nor are our children provided with free college tuition. Nobody chooses to become a health-care worker to become rich, but the reality is that boosting compensation for health-care fields will allow these positions to become stable careers that allow people to raise a family and retire with dignity.

At the press conference where we announced the settlement for Desert Springs and Valley RNs, a hospital executive pointed out that the higher wages (the average RN at these hospitals will see a 20 percent wage increase over the next three years) had already convinced one applicant to take a job at one of the hospitals.

For too long, Nevadans who could afford it went somewhere else if they needed a major medical procedure. We want Nevadans to get quality care at home. By making nursing better in our state, we believe that we are closer to that goal.

Donna West has been a Las Vegas nurse for 23 years. She is currently an operating room nurse at Valley Hospital and a member of Service Employees International Union Nevada.