Hiring Part-time Nurses Does Not Completely Prevent Morbidity During Staffing Shortages: A Study

A new study has revealed that during hospital staffing shortages, hiring a high number of part-time workers was associated with an increased risk of patient mortality.

“Our research shows that dealing with low staffing levels by using part-time staff to fill gaps has the benefit of avoiding deaths in wards. The risk associated with low staffing is greater than “However, our findings challenge the notion that temporary staffing is a cost-effective long-term solution to patient safety,” said the lead author. , Peter Griffiths of the University of Southampton, England, in a news release.

“Previous studies have supported the positive effect of using more senior staff on the team, and our findings are consistent with this. This suggests that the new role of the registered nurse, which “It will increase the role of senior support staff in the fleet, it has some benefits,” added Griffiths. The findings were published in JAMA Open Network.

According to previous studies, hiring part-time nursing staff was associated with a higher risk of adverse events due to unfamiliarity with the particular health care setting that may lead to poor performance. within the group and causing more harm to patients. But other studies have argued that there are no negative effects on patient outcomes from using part-time nurses to augment care staff levels. Next British Medical Journal the study found that senior registered nurses are more productive and can partially mitigate the negative effects of the workforce shortage.

To investigate further, Griffiths and the team analyzed the data of 626,313 patients who were admitted to four health care centers in the United Kingdom. Of all admissions, more than 80% were emergencies, and 65.8% were for other medical conditions. Most patients had at least one death during hospitalization.

Of the 514,899 patients who were admitted to the hospital on days when there were fewer registered nurses on duty, 5.3% died compared with 4% among patients who did not experience labor shortage. That meant that each day of understaffing of registered nurses was associated with an 8% risk of patient death.

“In this cohort study, when patients were exposed to nursing staffing days, the risk of death increased significantly. Staffing was associated with a difference in the risk of death, but there was no evidence that more senior staff or part-time staff can fully compensate for the effect of lower staff. There was some evidence that having more senior staff in nursing teams was associated with a reduced risk of death, but the results were inconsistent,” the authors wrote in the study. “A higher number of part-time workers was associated with an increased risk of death. The nursing staff of the center had a greater unfavorable association than those employed in the hospital bank.”

“Although the benefits of avoiding short-term workers were greater than the risks associated with part-time workers, the benefits from more workers were reduced, and, in the case of nursing workers employed by organization, they were not suitable,” the authors added.

“The damage associated with understaffing was greater than that associated with using temporary workers to correct any shortfall. Although this finding is encouraging, the use of temporary workers to correct deficiencies is unlikely of having more money because the results are worse with higher costs,” they concluded.