Nurse to patient ratios and patient saftety/nurse burnout

Nursing Students General Students

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Specializes in PICU.

Hi All

I am taking a nursing research class and we have to do a paper on a topic that we may deem problematic. I chose to do something in regards to the nurse patient ratio and nurse burnout. At my place of employment the ratios are based on numbers as opposed to acuity. With the world changing and people living longer with certain illness, I feel ratios based on acuity is more appropiate. to get the point, I am having a bit of problem with my search online for journal articles and things of that nature. I dont know if I am searching for the wrong thing or in the wrong place. I need to critique an article as well as do a proposal ont he topic. Can you please direct in me in the right direction as far as my search is concerned and where I can get some good information to complete my assignements.

Thanks in advance, Cina

I totally agree with you-Care homes suffer the same issues. Within my ex residential home of 15 patients, there were only 2 carers on at a time (a girl to every 8) but our owner often would scout hospitals for the nearly dying, spewing nonsense about "wouldn't your relative rather pass away peacefully in a comfortable room rather than a hospital bed?" and the 2 untrained unqualified carers would have to try and take care of not only 14 completely dependant service users, but try and give extra care to this other person who would require 2 of us for everything, leaving the floor completely empty of staff. Not to mention, this peaceful send off was just that-we could spare about 2 minutes to make sure they had a clean pad and had drunk in the past hour before we would have to rush off, leaving them completely alone in a far away room lying on a bed with nothing but a tv or radio for hours at a time. It was completely soul destroying. But-the ratio was up to standards for a residential home. I would love to see your research after you've done your project.

Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

don't know if you're going to find this in nursing journals. staffing by acuities may be something looked at by management so my suggestion would be to look at nursing management journals. we had staffing acuity software when i was a supervisor. my guess is that the people studying this would be administration. so, the american hospital association would be a place to start looking for clues.

i don't want to sound critical, but one thing i learned from my nursing research class is never pick a research subject without having done a journal article search first to see that there really are articles to support the subject you have chosen. otherwise, you get stuck in the jam you currently have found yourself.

Just finished up a bib card on a familiar subject. Here's the link to the article, hope it helps.... www.medscape.com/viewarticle/562717 The article is The Impact of Stress Management on Nursing Productivity and Retention from a journal called Nursing Economics. It addresses the shortage in relation to burnout.

Good luck=)

Specializes in Trauma, Teaching.

The problem with only accuity is that the criteria for accuity "points" can be vary arbitrary. Our hospital spent thousands of dollars in the 80s and 90s on one accuity survey after another. At one time, they claimed we could carry 12 points a piece, so 3 heavy level "4" patients was okay, which it was not! 6 level 2's still need care even if there aren't a lot of technical things you can document to justify care. Noone was ever happy with the way we rated patients as opposed to what the paper or the supervisor said. And if the numbers called for more nurses than we had, the admin fell back on ratios!

No, both numbers and accuity should be taken into account, with a maximum number of patients regardless of accuity. Low care patients still deserve good nursing care.

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