Week 6 DQ Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care

NURSE STAFFING AND QUALITY OF CARE 2 The Emergency department normally experiences a surge in the number of patients. The clinical stability of patients varies considerably. To provide optimal care for patients a more flexible and responsive staffing pattern is required. In delivering high-quality and timely care in the Emergency Department, correct staffing is essential. A combination of the increased number of patients and shortage of nurses in the Emergency Department has resulted in the formulation of a number of staffing models (Gedmintas et al., 2010). This paper will, however, address the case-mix model which quantifies the type and number of patients or diseases that a nurse attend to or treat (Harrington & Swan, 2003). Case-mix uses diseases as the main criterion for measurement because it forms the primary reason for consuming hospital services (Harrington & Swan, 2003). This system puts patients into categories based on acuity, need or dependency. Then, the service provided to the patients and the required time for each service by each nurse is computed. From here, average nursing resources needed per-patient in each shift is established (Harrington & Swan, 2003). This helps establish the required number of nursing resources. It can be used to establish whether there is a shortage hence more recruitment (Harrington & Swan, 2003). This can produce sufficient staffing to provide quality care. Direct measurement of output can produce positive patient outcome as adjustments to increase efficiency can be made. (Harrington & Swan, 2003). It can also be used to contain costs because it ensures out-put based reimbursement (Twigg et al., 2015). Diseases based grouping ensures consistency in payment (Twigg et al., 2015). To conclude, the case-mix model helps quantify diseases against the available nursing resources hence it becomes easy to identify nursing shortage or surplus. This facilitates nursing staffing. It is also based on the output which helps in containing costs and improving patient This study source was downloaded by from CourseH on :18:04 GMT -06:00 NURSE STAFFING AND QUALITY OF CARE 3 outcomes. Consequently, this method is the best for Emergency Department nurse staffing since it faces serious staffing challenges.