How many more decades?!?

How many more decades must we continue this fight for safe nurse to patient ratio staffing?!?! Remember the “mandated ratio” legislation INCLUDES patient acuity and nurse skill mix adjustment. #SafePatientLimits indeed saves lives.

“Nightingale rigorously researched the impact of the introduction of trained nurses on mortality in military hospitals. Once having established an association between trained nurses and reductions in patient deaths, she spent much of her life advocating for these findings to be widely translated into practice to improve the quality and safety of hospital care. The International Year of the Nurse and Midwife in 2020 in recognition of the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth is a fitting time to take action based on the preponderance of evidence to date that good professional nurse staffing results in safer and higher quality hospital inpatient care. “

“All three papers confirm—at least with respect to mortality—that low RN staffing increases the risk for poor outcomes for patients. What is especially important about the confirmation provided by the Needleman et al 4 11 and Griffiths et al 13 papers is that they show longitudinal associations between RN staffing and patient outcomes at the patient level, within hospitals, which suggests that the cross-sectional associations found in studies that use hospital-level RN staffing data and compare outcomes across hospitals, such as the RN4CAST study, are more likely to be causal than artefactual and reflect differences in patient exposures to different staffing levels as well. We provide additional evidence of this in our own recent work”

“The findings of the RN4CAST paper on the outcomes of nursing skill mix are closer to those of Griffiths et al than to Needleman et al, showing, for example, that substituting one nursing assistant for an RN for every 25 patients is associated with a 21% increase in the odds of dying”.

Credit to authors: Linda H Aiken and Douglas M Sloane

Nurses Matter: More Evidence

#NursesTakeDC www.nursestakedc.com