Wanna get out of the hospital alive? Well, the nursing staff
has a lot to do with it. Now a study finds that a patient's
risk of dying goes up along with the number of work shifts that
a hospital is understaffed in nurses. The research was published
in The New England Journal of Medicine. [Jack Needleman et al.,
"Nurse Staffing and Inpatient Hospital Mortality"]
The study included almost 198,000 patients, during nearly 177,000
eight-hour nursing shifts.
The research team originally reported that hospital nurse staffing
was tied to patients' outcomes a decade ago. That study was
challenged because data were collected at several institutions,
and thus had numerous possibly confounding variables. In the
current study, all data were collected at a single, large academic
medical center in the U.S.
The researchers found that a patient's risk of death increased
by about two percent for each work shift that was what the
researchers categorized as understaffed. Patients in the study
averaged three such shifts, which meant that their risk of dying
increased by more than six percent compared with patients with
access to fully staffed nursing teams. So when it comes to nurses
it's about quality-and quantity.