BU Health Policy Institute receives grant to study complex patient care, staffing, and c...( project. Understanding work va...),Health

"Understanding work variability is critical to forming effective solutions for safe and high quality nursing care," said Marilyn Dubree, chief nursing officer for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Other hospitals planning to participate in the project include: Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Caritas Norwood Hospital, and Beverly Hospital, the latter two are in Massachusetts. The MVP is currently working with each of these three hospitals in separate initiatives aimed at improving hospital operations.

The new project involves the collection and analysis of data on admissions, patient census, nurse staffing, and patient care in a medical/surgical unit in each of the four hospitals. Although variability in census and nurse-to-patient ratios also affects other types of inpatient units, medical/surgical units are often the largest units in the hospital and thus impact the most patients. The data analysis is expected to shed light on three key issues:

• The extent to which variations in hospital patient census produce variations in the number of patients cared for by individual nurses;
• Whether variations in the number of patients cared for by each nurse affect the amount of time nurses spend providing direct care to patients; and
• Whether and to what extent variations in patient census are attributed to scheduled/elective admissions compared to unscheduled/emergency admissions.

A growing number of studies report that inadequate nurse staffing is associated with an increased risk of adverse patient outcomes, including mortality. Efforts to improve nurse staffing in hospitals by hiring more nurses have been and continue to be constrained by a limited supply of nurses and the substantial costs associated with recruiting new nurses. Forecasts of a future and much larger shortage developing in the next decade suggest that hospitals will continue to
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Contact: Kira Edler
kedler@bu.edu
617-358-1240
Boston University
16-May-2006