Nursing Assignment: Nurse Staffing and Its Effect on Patient Safety

This nursing assignment explores the critical relationship between nurse staffing levels and patient outcomes, emphasizing the significance of appropriate nurse-patient ratios in ensuring quality and safety in healthcare settings. The report highlights how inadequate staffing contributes to adverse events such as medication errors, falls, and infections, impacting both nurses' well-being and patient care. It references studies demonstrating the link between staffing levels and patient mortality, nosocomial infections, and length of hospital stays. The assignment proposes strategies to promote quality and safety, including workforce flexibility, optimal nurse-patient ratios, and positive practice environments. It stresses the importance of addressing nursing shortages and creating supportive work conditions to improve patient outcomes and retain nursing staff. The assignment includes relevant references to support its findings and recommendations.

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Nursing assignment
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

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Nurse Staffing and Outcome of care
Scope and impact of the topic issue:
Nurse staffing or appropriate patient-nurse ration is an important parameter that
determines the patient care quality and safety. It is directly related to outcome of care as
adequate nurse-patient ratio promotes efficiency in care delivery, increases job satisfaction and
patient satisfaction with care (Frith et al, 2012). However, the issues is that many hospital fail to
maintain required nurse staffing level thus contributing to many issues for nurse. Nurses who are
forced to work for long shift are often overworked, stress and dissatisfied with the job. Due to
time constraints and the need to care for large number of patient than required, they fail to give
proper care to individual patient. This results in high incidence of adverse events like medication
error, fall incidence, hospital-associated infection and injury in patient (Rahman & Shamsudin,
2015).. Hence, nurse staffing issue not only affects performance of nurses, but also has an impact
on outcome of care.
Many evidence exists to show the effect of nurse staffing levels on high rate of falls and
deaths in hospital. Wong, Cummings & Ducharme (2013) proved impact of nurse staffing on
patient outcome by showing that low nurse staffing level significantly increases the risk of
nosocomial infection, patient fall and patient mortality in a clinical setting. Along with the
increase in adverse patient event, nurse staffing level also increase length of stay in hospital and
total health expenditure. Another study established link between patient outcome nurse staffing
level by conducting a cross-sectional interview based research with nurses working in surgical
and medical wards in 12 private hospitals. The findings of the study revealed that low nurse:
patient ratio had negative association with quality of care and patient safety compared to those

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hospitals with high staffing level (Rahman & Shamsudin, 2015). Zhu et al. (2012) also proved
the association between staffing level and patient outcome by showing that when number of
nursing staff per patient is increases, positive patient outcome is achieved. Hence, from this
discussion it is understood that taking step to maintain optimal nurse staffing level is necessary
to get positive patient outcome and promote safety in practice.
Plan to promote quality/safety practice:
As nursing shortage is the main factor that contributes to nurse staffing issue and poor
quality of care, the plan is to promote safety practices in clinical setting by maintaining
workforce flexibility and keeping optimal nurse-patient ratio so that all patient get the right
attention and care from nurses. Nurse working in hospital for longer hours mostly suffer from
burnout and develop the intention to leave the job because of stress, poor nursing care and high
rate of adverse events. To increase the performance of nursing staff and promote patient safety,
the nursing workforce should be given flexibility of timing so that they do feel stressed out. The
number of breaks and optimal work hours should be planned and nursing shift hours should be
rotated according to those criteria. This would lead to fewer undesirable shift and enable the
nurse to provide optimal care to patient (Kortbeek et al., 2015). Another approach that is needed
to prevent adverse event and address staffing level issue is to create positive practice
environment in clinical setting. Positive practice environment means giving sufficient resource,
greater autonomy, flexible work hours and effective nurse leaders to prevent medication error.
All these factors are strategies to retain nurse, promote excellence in care and the practice
environment. Clinical managers should also put effort to keep staffing levels high so that each
nurse gets regular breaks from work and consistency in care is maintained (Twigg &
McCullough, 2014).

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References:
Frith, K. H., Anderson, E. F., Tseng, F., & Fong, E. A. (2012). Nurse staffing is an important
strategy to prevent medication errors in community hospitals. Nursing Economics, 30(5),
288.
Kortbeek, N., Braaksma, A., Burger, C. A., Bakker, P. J., & Boucherie, R. J. (2015). Flexible
nurse staffing based on hourly bed census predictions. International journal of
production economics, 161, 167-180.
Rahman, H. A., & Shamsudin, A. S. (2015). The impact of patient to nurse ratio on quality of
care and patient safety in the medical and surgical wards in Malaysian private hospitals: a
cross-sectional study. Asian Social Science, 11(9), 326.
Twigg, D., & McCullough, K. (2014). Nurse retention: a review of strategies to create and
enhance positive practice environments in clinical settings. International journal of
nursing studies, 51(1), 85-92.
Wong, C. A., Cummings, G. G., & Ducharme, L. (2013). The relationship between nursing
leadership and patient outcomes: a systematic review update. Journal of nursing
management, 21(5), 709-724.
Zhu, X. W., You, L. M., Zheng, J., Liu, K., Fang, J. B., Hou, S. X., ... & Wu, Z. J. (2012). Nurse
staffing levels make a difference on patient outcomes: a multisite study in Chinese
hospitals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 44(3), 266-273.