Staffing Ratios in Healthcare
Student Name
Program Name, Institution
COURSE CODE: Course Title
Instructor Name
Date
Staffing Ratios in Healthcare
Nurse staffing ratio is the number of patients per nurse, it indicates how many patients a nurse would be directly responsible for during a time period. Nurse to patient ratio is a major issue that is discussed in the nursing community, an example of nurse-to-patient ratio would be in a medical surgical unit were a nurse is responsible for five patients, then the nurse-to-patient ratio would be 1:5 (Zhu et al., 2012). Depending on the patient acuity, the higher the acuity the lower the nurse-to-patient ratio. Most intensive care units prefer to have a 1:2 to max of 1:3 ratio, while most medical surgical units, nurse to patient ratio units are 1:5 up to 1:7 ratio depending on staffing availability, in most hospitals a staffing supervisor is usually responsible for the monitoring and management of nurse staffing.
Staffing Ratios in Healthcare
There are currently no federal rules that mandate a minimal level nurse-to-patient ratio; however, there are federal policies in place, such as the 42 Code of Federal Regulations, which mandates that healthcare facilities eligible to take part in Medicare have sufficient supply of certified registered nurses, vocational clinicians, and other staff to provide clinical care to all patients as required (Zhu et al., 2012). This nonexistence of federal law has prompted states to create different regulations to address this issue, as allowed by law. California is the only state that requires a minimal nurse-to-patient ratio to be observed at all times per unit in its laws and regulations. Massachusetts established a legislation mandating a nurse-to-patient ratio of 1:1 or 1:2, based on the patient’s health.
Mandating nurse to patient ratio would force hospitals to draft means of reducing overhead cost, that comes from hiring more nurses to meet requirements of this law; by hiring less non licensed personnel, like nurse aide thereby making nurses do things they normally would not have to do at work; this therefore defeats the purpose of reducing the workload on the nurse (Cook et al., 2012). There are also studies from interviews that show that waiting time in the emergency room increased and in some cases patient diversion to staffed hospitals due to lack of staffing to meet the mandatory staffing requirements.
References
Cook, A., Gaynor, M., Stephens, M., & Taylor, L. (2012). The effect of a hospital nurse staffing mandate on patient health outcomes: Evidence from California’s minimum staffing regulation. Retrieved from http://www.bristol.ac.uk/medialibrary/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp283.pdf
Zhu, X., You, L., Zheng, J., Liu, K., & Fang, J. (2012). Nurse Staffing Levels Make a Difference on Patient Outcomes: A Multisite Study in Chinese Hospitals