Getting Nurse Staffing Right Is Critical – Patient Mortality Depends On It.

When I was the CEO of a large academic hospital we were constantly concerned to properly balance nurse staffing. More staff than needed meant wasted money and too little staffing risked lesser quality care and nurse disharmony and even resignations. But adjusting the staffing levels of multiple units, each with differing patient types and needs was a major effort and easily thwarted by rapidly varying census numbers, patient admissions and transfers to other units, nurse shortages, and many other factors. In retrospect it is remarkable that it worked as well as it did. But the risk management group was ever concerned that if the staff levels were too thin it was possible that adverse events could occur.

Now there is a new study reported in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine that links deficiencies in nurse staffing with increases in patient mortality. The investigators evaluated an unnamed academic hospital with a strong record of high quality and lower than expected patient mortality. They looked shift by shift and noted whether that shift was at targeted levels based on patient acuity, over or under. They also looked at the level of patient turnover during each shift. Quoting from the article, “In an institution with a history of success in meeting staffing levels and with a level of patient mortality that was substantially below that predicted by its case mix, we found that the risk of death increased with increasing exposure to shifts in which RN hours were 8 hours or more below target staffing levels or there was high turnover. We estimate that the risk of death increased by 2% for each below target shift and 4% for each high turnover shift to which the patient was exposed.” [Italics mine]

The take away message to me is that hospital executives and boards need to be sure that they are managing nurse shift decisions carefully. In any hospital, personnel constitute about 60% or more of expenses and nurses represent about one half of that so the dollars are not inconsequential and need to be managed appropriately. Clearly, “appropriately” also means assuring that each unit has the necessary complement of registered nurses on each shift. From the article, “Our findings suggest that nurse staffing models that facilitate shift to shift decisions on the basis of an alignment of staffing with patients needs and the census are an important component of the delivery of care.” It also means that hospitals need to look at their approach to transferring patients from unit to unit. Often times this is necessary such as movement of an unstable patient to an ICU. But this study makes the point that excess transfers can be detrimental to patient welfare and may require more than the usual staff numbers. “Our results suggest that both target and actual staffing should be adjusted to account for the effect of turnover on patient outcomes.”
How a hospital aligns its nurse staffing is an important element of quality in addition to cost management. Getting staffing right is critical. When it is correct, mortality will be lower. Further, although not measured, if mortality came down in this study, it is fairly safe to assume that other quality measures were improved as well.

Protocol Medicine – It Is Time For Doctors To Recognize Their Value

We hear that doctors do not like “protocol medicine” – they do not want to follow a “cookbook” when every patient is different. It is not a good understanding of the issues.

Some years ago when I worked in a branch of he National Cancer Institute and then the University of Maryland Cancer Center, we admitted many patients with acute leukemia. The treatment approach including the necessary special tests to obtain, chemotherapy drugs, steps to prevent infection, prevent kidney problems, etc was complicated. So I wrote out a set of admission orders, had them typed up, xeroxed and kept at the nurses’ station. When a new patient was admitted, the physician took one of those order sheets and either accepted each individual order or made changes. But the doctor now would not forget something important such as a drug, its dose or the number of times per day. This worked much better than depending on memory yet any specific order could be eliminated or modified as needed for the individual patient. This was not a “cookbook” but rather an improvement in both safety and quality.

Peter Pronovost and colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have worked on designing similar protocols for ICU patients for those needing the insertion of a central intravenous catheter to reduce the frequency of hospital acquired infections. This is basic stuff like gown and glove, use a disinfectant on the skin, use sterile materials, etc. It works; the infection rate falls by 60% if the guidelines are followed. Indeed in the Michigan hospitals where the technique was evaluated, the rate dropped to zero.

Remarkably, many doctors at hospitals across the country rebel at having those steps to follow using the same argument of “protocol medicine.” And equally remarkably, most hospital executives are hesitant to insist. They will need to become more assertive and physicians must accept the new standards. It is a matter of rights and responsibilities.

If physicians want the public (and elected representatives) to be supportive of malpractice tort reform, they will first have to accept “protocol or “cookbook” or “checklist” approaches that are tried and proven to improve quality and safety.