Nursing is one of the most important services in the healthcare system delivered through professional nurses. The nurses play an essential part in patient care, including diagnosis, drug prescription, self-care education, guidance, psychiatric care, and assistance for coordinated care. In delivering the various services for the patient’s wellbeing, the nurse-patient ratio highly impacts the timeliness and quality of care, among other aspects of care. An increased ratio of nurses to patients reduces the amount of work per nurse and thus provides for timely care and reduced nurse burnout, which is also associated with poor quality of healthcare services (Cho et al., 2017). The research aims to establish the impact of inadequate nurse-patient ratio on the quality of care, which is hypothesized to have an inversely proportional relationship. This paper will review two research articles on the impact of the nurse-patient ratio on the quality of care and the wellbeing of the nurse practitioners.
The search for the articles was done on the Google Search Engine and the “Google Scholar” database to acquire the relevant research articles for the research. The main search keywords include “patient-nurse ratio,” “impact of a nurse shortage,” and “nurse shortage and quality of care.” The search provided a list of numerous articles relevant to the topic of study on the impact of nurse shortage on the quality of care. The articles included in the literature review are those aged five years and below (From 2017 to 2021). This ensured that the articles chosen were the most recent with relevant content. The articles also included for the literature review are research articles and not personal opinions.
There are two main articles registered for literature review after the search from the online database. The two articles include Chen et al. (2019) and Driscoll et al. (2018).
Chen et al. (2019)
The research study aimed to investigate the effects of the patient-nurse ratio on the nurses’ intention to leave and considering the mediation roles of burnout and job dissatisfaction. The authors wanted to establish whether the ratio affects the nurses’ view towards the nursing profession, leads to underlying stress and job dissatisfaction. The quantitative study analyzed cross-sectional surveys on the average daily patient-nurse ratios (ADPNR), personal burnout of the nurses, client-related burnout, intention to leave, and job dissatisfaction, among other aspects. The study conducted for 1409 full-time RNs in the medical and surgical wards indicated a relationship between the ADPNR levels and the intention to leave the nursing job, mediated by the factors of personal burnout, job dissatisfaction, and client-related burnout. According to the results, high ADPNRs predicted high client-related burnout, personal burnout, and job dissatisfaction that contributed to the nurses’ intention to leave the workplace or the nursing profession. The research concluded that an increased patient-nurse ratio induces high levels of personal burnout, dissatisfaction, and client-related burnout that eventually increase the nurses’ intention to leave their job.
Driscoll et al. (2018)
Driscoll et al. (2018) identified the lack of an optimal number of nurses in acute care hospitals for high-quality delivery of services. The purpose of the systematic review and meta-analysis examination was to examine the association between the nurse staffing levels and the nurse-sensitive outcomes in the acute specialist units. The research included articles published between 2006 and 2017 from nine electronic databases. The articles considered for the study were cross-sectional, utilizing large administrative databases. According to the research article, higher staffing levels were associated with reduced medication errors, mortality rates, restraint use, ulcers, hospital-acquired infections, pneumonia, higher use of aspirin, and timeliness in care for the percutaneous coronary complications. These results generally indicated that the increased ratio of nurses to the patients reduced the strains leading to a positive patient outcome. The study concluded that nurse-to-patient ratios highly influence patient outcomes, especially on key quality indicators such as timeliness of care, mortality rates, and risks to HAIs.
The results of the two research articles indicated a positive relationship between the number of nurse practitioners in a healthcare environment, their workload, and the quality of services delivered. Chen et al. (2019) sought to establ
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