INQRI grantees Mary Blegen and Tom Vaughn and their team recently published a new article, "Baccalaureate education in nursing and patient outcomes" which examined the effects of registered nurse (RN) education by determining whether nurse-sensitive patient outcomes were better in hospitals with a higher proportion of RNs with baccalaureate degrees.
The Institute of Medicine's report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health recommends increasing the percentage of RNs with baccalaureate degrees from 50% to 80% by 2020. Research has linked RN education levels to hospital mortality rates but not with other nurse-sensitive outcomes.
This was a cross-sectional study that, with the use of data from 21 University HealthSystem Consortium hospitals, analyzed the association between RN education and patient outcomes (risk-adjusted patient safety and quality of care indicators), controlling for nurse staffing and hospital characteristics. Hospitals with a higher percentage of RNs with baccalaureate or higher degrees had lower congestive heart failure mortality, decubitus ulcers, failure to rescue, and postoperative deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism and shorter length of stay.
The recommendation of the Future of Nursing report to increase RN education levels is supported by these findings.
Click here to access the article via PubMed.
Unlock your freedom: Replace “should” with “could”
44 minutes ago
No comments:
Post a Comment