Nurse Staffing Ratios

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Recommended: How nurse staffing ratio impacts quality of care and patient safety

This purpose of this research paper is to identify and explore the effects of nurse staffing ratios on patient’s outcomes. Hospitals are currently under pressure to suppress the high nurse-patient ratios, while improving patient health outcomes (Cho, Lee, Kim, Park & Sung, 2016). The concerns of choosing appropriate nurse staffing levels are essential and disputable decisions facing hospitals. Intuitively, one would expect that relatively high nurse staffing ratios are associated with improved patient outcomes. If this intuition is correct, these patient benefits should be a key consideration in the determination of nurse staffing levels. There has been a growing need for higher ratios of nurses to patients in the hospital due to the rising acuity of patients. The safety and quality of patient care is directly related to the size and experience of the nursing workforce (Cho, Ketefian, Barkausks & Smith, 2015). Decisions about nurse staffing should be guided by clear empirical evidence on this matter, and indeed a number of recent studies have examined this issue (Cho et al., 2016). Cause of concern has accelerated about the negative impact of low nursing staffing ratios on both patient and nurses due to nurse fatigue from work overload (Cho …show more content…

The normal ratio of nurses in a medical-surgical floor or unit to number of patient is 1:6 and a ratio of 1:2 or 1:1 in an Intensive Care Unit. This means that anytime the ratio is more than the appropriate level whether mandatory or obligatory, it is defined as high nurse-patient ratio (Falk & Wallin, 2016). In the intensive care units, settings most nurses work 1:1 or 1:2 depending on the stability of the patient, high nurse-patient in this case will be ratios higher than this normal ratio (Cho et al.,

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