Hours of Care

[nicudirector]

Can anyone tell me what their hours of care are for Intermediate and Intensive Care Nurseries? If so, what are the worked hours and the paid hours per patient day? Also, who are the support staff for the NiCU that are included in the hours? Thanks.

[Jolie, BSN]

Are you preparing a budget, or attempting to justify the hiring of new staff members? I don't have time now to explain the means of calculating the numbers you are requesting, but even in my small (8 bed)unit, this was a lengthy task and involved calculating the number of patient days in a given period, the number of hours of nursing care per patient day depending on the level of care the baby received (intensive care, step-down, feeder-grower, etc.), and the amount of revenue generated for each RN staffed on the unit. We also had to justify the staffing of RNs who weren't "generating income" such as those doing policy and procedure work, QI, staff education, etc.

I would imagine that there are now computer programs which could generate this info in a much more timely fashion rather than using the paper and pencil method. Is there someone in your hospital's finance department or a computer whiz who could help you do this?

Good luck. It's no fun!

[nicudirector]

I was just asking because we have all new people in Finance and they want a community survey of other NICUs. Our hours per patient day is 12.521. This is for combined Level 2 & 3 nurseries.