Nurse staffing is a critical health care component as nurses are a vital component of
the health care delivery system. Scholars agree that nurse staffing has consequences on
patient safety and quality of healthcare delivery (Driscoll et al., 2018). Owing to the pivotal
role of nurses in the delivery and provision of quality of care, the optimal dosing of the ratio
of nurses caring for patients in any healthcare institution remains a focal facet.
Describe the selected issue. Discuss how it impacts quality of care and patient
safety in the setting in which it occurs.
At all nursing practice levels and in all settings, nurse staffing levels affect the ability
of the nurses to deliver safe and quality healthcare that ultimately influences patient care
results. Appropriate nurse staffing can be explained as a match of nurse expertise with the
needs and requirements of the patient or the receiver of nursing care services in the context of
EFFECTIVE APPROACHES IN MANAGEMENT
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the practice setting and circumstance (Driscoll et al., 2018). These authors go on to define
nurse staffing by explicating high nursing staff as a higher proportion of nurses for
apportioned patients and lower nurse staffing as a lower proportion of nurses for the number
of assigned patients. Therefore, it is very important to have optimal nurse-to-patient ratio to
ensure improved patient safety and desirable health outcomes. In light of the vitality of the
issue nurse staffing ratio, the impacts of nurse staffing ratio on patient outcomes will be
described below.
Driscoll et al. (2018) discovered that nurse staffing has an influence on in-hospital
patient mortalities. Precisely, as the authors discussed, “a higher level of nurse staffing was
associated with a decrease in the risk of in-hospital mortality”. The authors concluded that
“for every increase of one nurse, patients were 14% less likely to experience in-hospital
mortality.” These scholars also assessed the impacts of nurse staffing on other nurse-sensitive
consequences including rate of nosocomial infections, failure to rescue, unplanned
extubation, and pressure sores occurrences, length of hospitalization, medication errors and
patient complications. Based on these metrics, these authors concluded that ineffective nurse
staffing ratios lead to compromised patient safety and adverse patient outcomes particularly
in acute healthcare settings.
Griffith et al. (2018) also concluded that poor nurse staffing ratios are connected with
increased risk of mortalities during hospitalization. The authors found that the mortality risks
increased by 3% for every day a patient experienced registered nurse staffing below ward
mean. To add on to that, these scholars posited that the use of nursing assistants to
compensate for shortages of registered nurses does not mitigate the possible detrimental
consequences of poor nurse staffing. There is a culmination of growing scholarly evidence
that lower nurse especially registered nurse staffing results in to heightened possibilities of
preventable patient harm.