Outpatient Clinic Nurse Patient Ratios

[ginurse21388]

Does anyone work in an outpatient clinic that has a written protocol or stipulations on nurse patient ratio? Or can you direct me to any EBP articles that address the subject?

I currently work in a high volume GI clinic that mainly manages chronic Liver/GI issues. On average nurses care for around 400-500 chronically ill patients each (each only works with one MD and may or may not have help of NP). The workload is causing some questions to arise and I was wondering if anyone had any input or similar staffing situations.

Thanks for your feedback!

[SaltySarcasticSally, LPN, RN]

Are we talking case management or being on the floor?

I worked on the floor for years as an LPN in a variety of offices, we never had any set # of patients we could see in a day.

Sometimes we had 45 patients in 4 hour or only 45 patients in 8 hours, just depends on the day/season. It never bothered me to have a lot of patients in one day but I could see how too many patients in case management may be hard to handle.

[klone, MSN, RN]

If you're looking for literature, you'd probably have more luck looking at case management caseloads, rather than outpatient nurse to patient ratio, since that's not really a thing (it would mean how many patients are physically in the clinic at any given moment that the nurse is caring for, and I'm assuming your clinic doesn't have 500 rooms, all of them occupied).