Does staffing contain, as opposed to elevate, costs? Is there a point where the care delivery model and staffing become a detriment to cost control? That is, where does the law of diminishing returns kick in, both cost-wise and care-wise?
The importance of nurse staffing to the delivery of high-quality patient care was a principal finding in the landmark report of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Committee on the Adequacy of Nurse Staffing in Hospitals and Nursing Homes: “Nursing is a critical factor in determining the quality of care in hospitals and the nature of patient outcomes”1 (p. 92). Nurse staffing is a crucial health
DNP 840 Topic 3 Discussion Question One
policy issue on which there is a great deal of consensus on an abstract level (that nurses are an important component of the health care delivery system and that nurse staffing has impacts on safety), much less agreement on exactly what research data have and have not established, and active disagreement about the appropriate policy directions to protect public safety.
The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and discuss the state of the science examining the impact of nurse staffing in hospitals and other health care organizations on patient care quality, as well as safety-focused outcomes. To address some of the inconsistencies and limitations in existing studies, design issues and limitations of current methods and measures will be presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for future research, the management of patient care and public policy.
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For several decades, health services researchers have reported associations between nurse staffing and the outcomes of hospital care.2–4 However, in many of these studies, nursing care and nurse staffing were primarily background variables and not the primary focus of study.5 In the 1990s, the National Center for Nursing Research, the precursor to the National Institute of Nursing Research, convened an invitational conference on patient outcomes research from the perspective of the effectiveness of nursing practice.6 It was hoped that as methods for capturing the quality of patient care quantitatively became more sophisticated, evidence linking the structure of nurse staffing (i.e., hours of care, skill mix) to patient care quality and safety would grow. However, 5 years later, the 1996 IOM report articulating the importance of nurses and nurse staffing on outcomes concluded that, at that time, there was essentially no evidence that staffing exerted an effect on acute care hospital patients’ outcomes and limited evidence of its impact on long-term care outcomes.1
There has been remarkable growth in this body of literature since the 1996 IOM report. Over the course of the last decade, hospital restructuring, spurred in part by a move to managed care payment structures and development of market competition among health care delivery organizations, led to aggressive cost cutting. Human resources, historically a major cost center for hospitals, and nurse staffing in particular, were often the focus of work redesign and workforce reduction efforts. Cuts in nursing staff led to heavier workloads, which heightened concern about the adequacy of staffing levels in hospitals.7, 8 Concurrently, public and professional concerns regarding the quality and safety of patient care were sparked by research and policy reports (among them, the IOM’s To Err is Human9), and then fueled by the popular media.
A few years ago, reports began documenting a new, unprecedented shortage of nurses linked to growing demand for services, as well as drops in both graduations from prelicensure nursing education programs and workforce participation by licensed nurses, linked by at least some researchers to deteriorating working conditions in hospitals.10, 11 These converging health care finance, labor market, and professional and public policy forces stimulated a new focus of study within health services research examining the impact of nurse staffing on the quality and safety of patient care. An expected deepening of the shortage in coming years12 has increased the urgency of understanding the staffing-outcomes relationship and offering nurses and health care leaders evidence about the impacts of providing care under variable nurse staffing conditions. This chapter includes a review of related literature from early 2007.
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