HELP! I must prove our inpatient facility is understaffed by tomorrow!

[ray2512]

I have a big problem. I must prove that our clients are not getting adequate care due to understaffing. I need to have my evidence by tomorrow afternoon about 3 pm. Here is the problem. I am having to explain not getting documentation done, quantitively or quality, I'm not sure. And there was a concern report that I was "not responding in a timely manner". We have a inpatient unit that is full most the time with 16 clients and having daily deaths and admissions. We only have 2 nurses staffed in the day time. Please let me know what your staffing is. It is way to busy to meet everyones needs and do perfect documentation too. Everyday there is some sort of crisis going on. Our home care staff have 20-21 clients per RN with four RNs on a team with one (sometimes) LPN helping. Understaffing seems to be an agency wide problem. But the management does not seem to make a connection between the needs of dying clients/families and staffing levels. I don't get my half hour lunch half the time and my breaks are usually cut short or non existent. I have been working there for 6 weeks and have only used the bathroom twice. I work three 12 hour shifts a week. My feet ache for hours when I get home. Please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[leslie :-D]

1:8 ratio is totally nuts.

just by virtue of being in an inpt unit, indicates much higher acuity levels.

our ratio is 1:4, sometimes less.

for ea pt, i have a s/s list w/orders, interventions, outcomes.

i keep close, documented tabs on ea pt.

often, my boss asks me if 4 pts are doable.

that's how crazy it gets.

your boss needs to shadow you.

seeing is believing.

if this continues, you need to find another job.

best of everything.

leslie

[Jolie, BSN]

Do you know how to calculate the number of nursing hours/patient day a given patient requires?

It sounds like you might be able to prove that your patients are requiring more hours of care per shift and per day than you have staff to provide.

It's a time-consuming process if you don't have a computer program, but provides objective data that administration would have a hard time refuting.

Good luck!

[XB9S, BSN, MSN, EdD, RN, APN]

your going to stuggle to provide the evidence in such a short time span. There are lots of workload audit tools around so it is worth doing a search on the internet but if you want documented evidence it is going to take more than 1 day.

Where I work our staffing ratio is 1 nurse to 8 patients that is on a busy acute surgical ward but then that's the UK health service for you. I am in the process of doing a staffing review using a workload audit tool from Nuffield university to provide evidence that we need more nurses but this is in conjunction with incident reports, risk assessment and nursing documentation all to support our review.

I am afraid that there is no quick fix for this sort of problem.