The Effect Of Nurse Staffing On Hospital Readmission: A Literature Review

The Effect of Nurse Staffing on Hospital Readmission: A Literature Review
Nurse staffing is perceived as a major issue due to its effect on the safety and quality of patient care (Hinno, Partanen and Vehvilainen-Julkunen, 2011). Inadequate patient care could result in readmission. Readmission and emergency department visits by patients within 30 days of their discharge exhibits avoidable and costly outcomes (Weiss, Yakusheva and Bobay, 2011). The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has developed a financial penalty refusing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services for hospital reimbursement due to readmission (Berenson, Paulus and Kalman, 2012). Hospitals are now seeking to reduce patient readmission. The pertinence of this literature review is to unfold the effect of nurse staffing on patient readmission.
Correlation between Nurse Staffing and Hospital Readmission
The result

Hinno et al. (2011), compared nurse staffing from Netherland with a lower patient workload and more registered nurses while Finland has few registered nurses, more licensed practical nurses with a higher nurse to patient ratio. The participants in this study were nurses, and no patients were involved (p. 1587). Therefore, the evaluation of adverse patient outcome could be biased because the relationship with the nurse to patient ratio questionnaires were only answered by the nurses.
Another inconsistency from the study could also be attributed to the variables. Variables related to the interdisciplinary care of patients, which could influence patients care and outcome such as direct observation of discharge education were not included (Weiss et al., 2011, p.1474). The reason for this inconsistency is because the study was done through patient questionnaires, electronic and administrative data collection. There were no contraindications noted from the research