[brian]

Comprehensive research gives credence to Calif. law concerning field of professional nursing

As a child, when Nursing and Sociology professor Linda Aiken read Helen Wells and Julie Tatham's Cherry Ames -- the nursing version of the Nancy Drew series -- she probably never dreamed that, in time, she too would become a sort of nurse-investigator extraordinaire.


Aiken, who also directs the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, conducted a large-scale research project along with fellow colleagues to investigate the quality of care and how nurse staffing levels affect patient safety in Pennsylvania hospitals. The study, whose results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2002, will be extended in the future to include California hospitals, and has brought fame and recognition to the group of researchers.

"For nursing research, it would be hard to beat Penn," says Joanne Spetz, associate professor of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. The study found that, when the nurse-to-patient ratio decreases and the number of nurses with baccalaureate degrees increases in hospitals, the patient mortality rate is significantly lowered. In fact, when the average patient-to-nurse ratio decreases from eight patients per nurse to four patients per nurse, the patient mortality rate decreases by 30 percent.

full story: http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/vn.../41526fe134fd2