Relating nursing workload to quality of care in child and adolescent mental health inpatient services

摘要

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a simple tool that enablesrninpatient psychiatric adolescent units to relate patient dependency to the number of nursing staffrnneeded to give a defined level of care. Recorded at the same time was the number of nurses on eachrnshift, and if they felt there were enough of them. A simple measure of what the ward felt like and if thernnurses felt they had been therapeutic was also made for each shift. Some results are presented and anrnattempt made to relate the number of staff needed to give a certain quality of care in the context ofrnrising dependency levels.rnDesign/methodology/approach - An observational study collecting quantitative data includingrnpatient dependency, staffing and staff satisfaction. These were recorded daily for three years.rnFindings - Results show that when there is high dependency in the ward, if there are not enoughrnnurses, then quality of care suffers. For our ward, a minimum of 11 nurses are needed to cover each 24rnhours and more if the dependency levels go up. If there are less than 11 nurses then the quality of carernsuffers.rnOriginality/value - Makes a strong connection between workload, staffing and care quality in arnspecific care group.