Nurse staffing can be measured several ways.
Hospitals, insurance companies, government agencies and citizen groups are always trying to figure out interpret what is going right and wrong in health care. Nurse staffing is critical to patient care delivery and achieving quality outcomes. However, no one has developed a singular, effective way to measure nurse staffing. In truth, there are several lenses through which hospital managers view nurse staffing. Therefore, quantifying your nurse staffing requires several approaches.
Instructions
1. Calculate your nurse to patient ratio. This is fairly easy. Simply tally the number of patients in a particular department, ward or in a medical facility at large, then divide that number by the number of nurses on duty. Most institutions consider a lower nurse to patient ratio a sign of quality care. The fewer patients a nurse has to tend, the more attention she can give each one.
However, many nursing researchers feel that nurse-to-patient ratios are not necessarily the best way to measure nurse staffing because often, patients are discharged and admitted during the course of a shift. Therefore, while a nurse may only have five patients at one time, she might actually have had eight or ten patients in her care during the course of her day.
2. Determine your nurse workload or utilization. While there is no one formula for a workload measurement, the idea is to figure out how much of a nurse's working time is occupied with patient care tasks. According to a 2004 study by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, nurses should spend no than 85% of their workday being "utilized" for direct patient care or a facility faces higher costs and poorer patient care outcomes.
3. Research your nurse retention. Look through personnel files to determine when each nurse began working with your institution. The median years worked is the most relevant number for understanding retention, though some people use average years worked for a retention measure. Obviously, the greater your retention, the stronger your overall nurse staffing situation.
4. Calculate the number of full time equivalent nurses (FTE) you have on staff. Technically, an FTE works 40 hours each week. Therefore, a nurse who works 36 hours per week is a .9 FTE. Hospitals usually have their ideal number of nurses and can tally up their FTEs to see how closely they match their targets. Because of alternate scheduling, such as the increasingly common 12-hour nursing shift, many facilities have changed their definition of an FTE to 36 hours per week since that is what a full-time nurse actually performs. This gives managers a clearer perspective when evaluating their nurse staffing.
5. Tally all nurses you have on your payroll. Most health care facilities have many more licensed nurses than they do FTEs. This stems from efforts to keep up staffing using per diem and part-time nurses. So, while some nurses may be infrequent workers, so long as they are active on your payroll, they are part of your total headcount.
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