Effectiveness of Nurse-Patient Ratio in Hospitals

-5 minute brief oral transcript
Elevator Pitch

Objective
Gap in care has been a major concern in the healthcare industry and various
reasons are there behind it. One of the main reasons is the staffing issue. Here, the
main objective of the study is to find the effectiveness of appropriate nurse-patient
ratio which should be 1:1 in hospitals while providing care and it is being
highlighted in the paper. It is assumed that in order to achieve a standardized as
well as positive health outcome of the patients it is important to maintain the
proper nurse-patient ratio which is being assessed in the research paper.

Background
Before conducting any research, it is important to have a look at the background of the topic to get a better outcome.
Nurses are dedicated to provide holistic care to the patients as well as their families. But, inadequate nursing staff can
cause many adverse effects on the patients’ health outcome. At the same time, it also leads to emotional exhaustion and
job dissatisfaction of the nurses (Nantsupawat et al., 2015). Several literatures discuss the impact of inappropriate nurse-
patient ratio on healthcare that clearly indicates that inadequate staffing increases the rate of infection, mortality and other
medication error (Lu, Zhao, & While, 2019). If a nurse is assigned to take care of too many patients simultaneously then it
is quite genuine that it can cause error and other issues while providing care. Again, some previous studies in this regard
mentioned that if a nurse takes care of many patients at a time, then the nurse need to work for longer hours which affects
his/her health in many ways (Cho et al., 2015). Therefore, according to the researchers it is important to implement some
innovative and different alternative approaches in order to reduce the excessive pressure of the nurses.