Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety

Background

For several decades, health services researchers have reported associations between nurse staffing and the outcomes of hospital care. However, in many of these studies, nursing care and nurse staffing were primarily background variables and not the primary focus of study In the 1990s, the National Center for Nursing Research, the precursor to the National Institute of Nursing Research, convened an invitational conference on patient outcomes research from the perspective of the effectiveness of nursing practice. It was hoped that as methods for capturing the quality of patient care quantitatively became more sophisticated, evidence linking the structure of nurse staffing (i.e., hours of care, skill mix) to patient care quality and safety would grow. However, 5 years later, the 1996 IOM report articulating the importance of nurses and nurse staffing on outcomes concluded that, at that time, there was essentially no evidence that staffing exerted an effect on acute care hospital patients’ outcomes and limited evidence of its impact on long-term care outcomes. Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety

There has been remarkable growth in this body of literature since the 1996 IOM report. Over the course of the last decade, hospital restructuring, spurred in part by a move to managed care payment structures and development of market competition among health care delivery organizations, led to aggressive cost cutting. Human resources, historically a major cost center for hospitals, and nurse staffing in particular, were often the focus of work redesign and workforce reduction efforts. Cuts in nursing staff led to heavier workloads, which heightened concern about the adequacy of staffing levels in hospitals. Concurrently, public and professional concerns regarding the quality and safety of patient care were sparked by research and policy reports (among them, the IOM’s To Err is Human, and then fueled by the popular media. A few years ago, reports began documenting a new, unprecedented shortage of nurses linked to growing demand for services, as well as drops in both graduations from prelicensure nursing education programs and workforce participation by licensed nurses, linked by at least some researchers to deteriorating working conditions in hospitals.These converging health care finance, labor market, and professional and public policy forces stimulated a new focus of study within health services research examining the impact of nurse staffing on the quality and safety of patient care. An expected deepening of the shortage in coming years has increased the urgency of understanding the staffing-outcomes relationship and offering nurses and health care leaders evidence about the impacts of providing care under variable nurse staffing conditions. This chapter includes a review of related literature from early 2007 Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety.

Identifying Nurse-Sensitive Outcomes

The availability of data on measures of quality that can be reasonably attributed to nurses, nursing care, and the environments in which care is delivered has constrained research studying the link between staffing and outcomes. While nurse leaders have been discussing the need to measure outcomes sensitive to nursing practice back to at least the 1960s, widespread use of the terms “nurse/nursing-sensitive outcomes” and “patient outcomes potentially sensitive to nursing” is a relatively recent development. Nurse-sensitive measures have been defined as “processes and outcomes that are affected, provided, and/or influenced by nursing personnel, but for which nursing is not exclusively responsible.”While some scholars feel the term “nurse-sensitive measure” is fundamentally incorrect because patient outcomes are influenced by so many factors, health care is practiced in a multidisciplinary context, and few aspects of patient care are the sole purview of nurses, there is a broad recognition that some outcomes reflect differences in the quality of nursing care patients receive and therefore presumably respond to the characteristics of the environments in which care is provided (including staffing levels).

No matter what label these measures are given, measures that have conceptual and clinical links to the practice of nursing and are sensitive to variations in the structure and processes of nursing care are an essential ingredient in this area of research. Data sources from which to construct these measures must be identified, and exact definitions indicating how measures are to be calculated must be drafted. This is particularly critical if different individuals or groups are involved in compiling quality measures. There have been calls for standardization of measures of the quality of health care for some time, along with outcome measures related to the quality of nursing care. Inconsistent definitions have slowed progress in research and interfered with comparability of results across studies. A paper, now under review, examines and compares common measures of adult, acute care nurse staffing, including unit-level hospital-generated data gleaned from the California Nursing Outcomes dataset, hospital-level payroll accounting data obtained from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, hospital-level personnel data submitted to the American Hospital Association, and investigator research data obtained from the California Workforce Initiative Survey. Findings reveal important differences between measures that may explain at least some inconsistencies in results across the literature (Spetz, Donaldson, Aydin, personal communication February, 2007).

Efforts to address the standardization imperative began with the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) first national nursing quality report card initiative. This initiative began with a literature search to identify potential nurse-sensitive quality indicators. Next, expert reviewers examined and validated a smaller, selected group of indicators and measures from among these.The ANA then funded six initial nursing quality report card indicator feasibility studies, which developed and refined these first sets of measures, documenting the quality of nursing care in acute care settings. The California Nursing Outcomes Coalition (CalNOC) was among the first State-based feasibility projects conducted by the ANA that ultimately served as the basis for the National Database for Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) established in 1997. Maintaining an informal collaboration with the NDNQI, CalNOC continues to function as a regional nursing quality database, and more recently, CalNOC methods have been adapted by both the emerging Military Nursing Outcomes Database and VA Nursing Outcomes Database projects. All four groups currently collect and analyze unit-level data related to the associations between nurse staffing and the quality and safety of patient care. Together, they have formed an unofficial collaborative of nursing quality database projects Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety