Surprise! (or not)
I know this is a bit of inside baseball for those of you not in healthcare, but in the nursing world it's a fairly hot subject. In 2004 Califonia, pushed hard by the California Nurses Association, became the first state in the nation (and the second jurisdiction in the world, following Victoria, Australia) to implement minimum ratios of nurses to patients. Understandably, the hospital industry, abetted by the non-union nursing associations, has fought hard to keep this idea from spreading. Now a new study is out that supports the validity of ratios to improve patient survival, nurse satisfaction and quality of care.
In the extended entry is a report cross posted from the nursing site
allnurses.com
The new study is by well-known researcher Linda Aiken and is a three-state study that looked at patient safety, nurse satisfaction and quality of care as rated by both staff nurses and management nurses. Here's the lede of a report from Health Leaders Media, which can be read in its entirety here: http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/...
If California's mandatory nurse-patient ratios had been in effect in Pennsylvania and New Jersey hospitals in 2006, those states would have seen 10.6% and 13.9% fewer deaths among general surgical patients, according to a Pennsylvania researcher's analysis.
That equated to 468 lives that might have been saved, says Linda Aiken, director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the study's lead author.
Her report was published in the journal Health Services Research, and is considered the first comprehensive evaluation of California's controversial 2004 nurse staffing ratio mandate and may inform decisions in 18 other states that are considering lowering their nurse-staff ratios, such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Illinois.
Aiken's study received funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health.
There's a lot more good information in that article linked above. I highly recommend reading it. And for those who want more detail, the original study can be found here:
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/...
Here's a very short summary of the results from the intro of the study:
Principal Findings.
California hospital nurses cared for one less patient on average than nurses in the other states and two fewer patients on medical and surgical units. Lower ratios are associated with significantly lower mortality.When nurses’ workloads were in line with California-mandated ratios in all three states, nurses’ burnout and job dissatisfaction were lower, and nurses reported consistently better quality of care.
Conclusions.
Hospital nurse staffing ratios mandated in California are associated with
lower mortality and nurse outcomes predictive of better nurse retention in California and in other states where they occur.
I encourage you to read at least the article above, and at least skim the study report. Isn't it time for all patients to have the benefit of ratios?