Development of a Nurse Staffing Model to Accurately Reflect Complexity and Intensity of Patient Care Needs in an Urban Academic Medical Center

Poster PresentationPurpose for the ProgramOur current staffing model, based on nursing hours per birth, does not accurately forecast registered nurse (RN) staffing needs during a 24‐hour period. Researchers have shown that the number of nurses may influence perinatal outcomes, which highlights the need to accurately project appropriate staffing. Perinatal outcomes are influenced by adequate staffing.Proposed ChangeTo identify a staffing model for our labor and delivery area that more accurately matched actual patient care needs. Academic medical centers (AMC) pose a unique staffing challenge because of the larger percentage of patients without adequate prenatal care and complex medical comorbidities. Our current productivity statistic that drives nurse staffing is number of births per day, which does not account for acuity or intensity of care. Eleven percent of patients are unaccounted for in our current model because their stays do not result in birth, yet they require nursing care (e.g., trauma, preterm labor). Variation also exists in intensity of care for a subset of women that lack adequate prenatal care and who have complex medical comorbidities.Implementation, Outcomes, and EvaluationWilson and Blegen developed a staffing model that provides a standardized measurement of nursing productivity, skill mix, and workload intensity that can be used to measure and evaluate outcomes. Based on their model, we captured the amount and intensity of nursing care using the follow...

Source: Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing - June 4, 2015 Category: Nursing Authors: Joan L. Torbet, Marleen Mulkeen, Lynn Stringer, Kate Fitzpatrick Tags: Professional Issues Source Type: research