Monday, August 2, 2010

Nurse Staffing, Using Acuity Systems

In a new article for Health Leaders Media, "Planning Nurse Staffing With a Patient Acuity System," Rebecca Hendren wrote about an acuity-based staffing model that helps determine how many patients one nurse can care for, depending on the patients' needs.  Saint Joseph Hospital in Chicago has implemented a software program—Res-Q from Concerro, that allows nurses to assign relative weight to patients that indicate how much care those patients need.

Click here to read the story.

An INQRI team at the University of Pennsylvania examined acuity-adjusted nurse staffing levels and nursing practice environments in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) and their effects on very low birth weight (VLBW) infant mortality, morbidity, failure-to-rescue and length of stay. While VLBW infants account for only 1% of births, half of infant deaths each year occur within this population. Since NICU cases are among the most nurse-intensive hospitalizations, nursing holds promise for explaining the variations and for improving the outcomes of these high-risk infants.  Care for these babies is typically among the most expensive care provided in a hospital, costing anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 for each patient. This is the first national study to examine the link between nursing and very low birth weight infants in NICUs.

The study examined care in more than 100 NICUs around the country to see how staffing and practice environment influence rates of death, brain hemorrhage, lung development and infection.  The findings show that babies in units where nurses have less support and limited professional practice are at higher risk of developing infections.  Higher levels of nurse staffing and the proportion of nurses with bachelor’s degrees in nursing and NICU experience are associated with better infant outcomes. This leads to fewer cases of complications such as bleeding in the brain, which is not only expensive to treat but can lead to long-term developmental problems that drive up health costs.

4 comments:

  1. Very good articles and also details about this blog,it’s very good and appreciates post for the next future.

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  2. Give some details about that topic of the article with full picture of the instruments,So tell me when you have update them.Thanks

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  3. IT Staffin, thank you for reading. As INQRI researchers continue to publish their findings, we always link back to their articles... so stay tuned!

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