The Human Impact Of Having Too Few Nurses

By guest blogger Lucy Maddox The UK population continues to grow, while nursing numbers have remained static for several decades. Compounding matters, The King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust have reported a 25 per cent increase in nurses and midwives leaving the NHS from 2012 to 2018, from 27,300 to 34,100. In short, in the UK, we now have far fewer nurses relative to the general population than we used to. What does this mean for patients’ care experience? The situation sounds bad, but how bad? Common sense would suggest that patients will experience poorer care when nurses are overstretched, and there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that interpretation. But there are also positive stories, and claims about greater efficiency compensating for fewer staff.  Now a study in BMJ Quality & Safety provides direct observational evidence suggesting that lower nurse-patient ratios really do result in poorer health-care interactions.  Jackie Bridges at the University of Southampton and her colleagues observed how patient-staff interactions varied across six NHS physical healthcare wards in England depending on the ratio of nursing and healthcare assistants to patients. In total, the researchers carefully rated 238 hours of care, which included over 3000 interactions between 270 patients and healthcare staff.  Overall, 10 per cent of those interactions were rated as negative – specifically “negative restrictive”, such as patients being moved without warning or...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Health Occupational Source Type: blogs