Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, clinical managing editor
Our recent Facebook post on an article on nurse staffing at the NPR Shots blog (“Need a Nurse? You May Have to Wait”) got a lot of responses. Staffing is a hot topic for nurses—from both a personal and a patient care perspective. And I say “hot” because it never fails to raise emotions.
Everyone agrees that adequate nurse staffing is essential for safe, high quality patient care and nursing job satisfaction. Research has shown that it significantly improves patient outcomes.
Yet we—nurses, as well as the larger health care community—continue to debate how to determine what “adequate staffing” is and how to best achieve it. Acuity-of-care measures? Unit-by-unit mandated staffing plans? State-mandated staffing ratios? What do you think?
We’ve published numerous articles and news pieces on this topic in recent years; here are a few examples:
News, reports, and analysis (open access articles)
“Nurse Staffing Matters—Again”
“California Mandated Nurse–Patient Ratios Deemed Successful”
Feature. Requires subsciption or purchase; abstract only
“Nurse Staffing and Patient, Nurse, and Financial Outcomes”
And here are some blog posts that deal either directly or indirectly with issues related to nurse staffing.
After leaving acute care for ten years I returned as a per diem nurse while completing my BSN studies. I have 15 years experience in nursing and understand the scope of quality care. I was discouraged as to how so much attention on technology has become a grande distraction from the PATIENT. when systems get stuck or don’t work nurses are stuck as well. No meds no information. You spend more time looking at a screen then listening to your patient. Until the business of healthcare dedicates enough time ( which varies patient to patient) to nurses to be with people quality outcomes will not improve in the ways it should.