Nurse staffing and patient safety in acute hospitals: Cassandra calls again?

The risk of adverse patient outcomes, including death, is lower in hospitals that provide more registered nurses to care for patients on inpatient wards. The association has been demonstrated in a body of evidence comprising several hundred studies, involving hundreds of hospitals and millions of patients from around the world. The association has been shown at hospital level in large cross-sectional studies and in a growing number of longitudinal studies examining the effect of variation in staffing experienced by individuals.1–3 In the context of such an extensive body of evidence, one might ask what could possibly be left to discover? In this issue of BMJ Quality and Safety, Zaranko and colleagues contributed some important new evidence.4 Their findings highlight further the potential consequences of the nursing shortages being experienced in many countries. Using data from 53 inpatient wards from three hospitals...
Source: Quality and Safety in Health Care - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research