What The Nursing Shortage Means For Patient Care

There is a shortage of registered nurses in the United States

, and it is an issue that should concern everyone because the shortage is affecting patient care.

Different studies and surveys have shown in disturbing detail what is happening.

Studies have shown, for example, a link between nurses with bachelor's degrees and lower mortality rates in hospitals, in addition to a shorter length of time spent in the hospital.

In addition, another study has shown that the nursing shortage, along with the increased workload that this leads to, also affects the quality of patient care. A University of Pennsylvania study showed a strong connection between greater education of nurses and better results for patients. The study showed that patients who have had surgery have a much better chance of survival if they are in hospitals with more nurses that have a bachelor's degree. In hospitals, a 10 percent increase in the number of nurses having a bachelor's degree meant a five percent decrease in the risk of patient death.

Nurses themselves have reported that the scarcity of registered nurses is having a detrimental effect on patient care, and is jeopardizing the effort to achieve the quality of care goals set by the Institute of Medicine. In an issue of Nursing Economics, almost 80 percent of the nurses surveyed said they believed the nursing shortage is affecting quality of care, not only in hospitals, but in long-term care and ambulatory care locations. More than 90 percent of them responded that they did not have enough time to keep up a high standard of patient safety, to detect early signs of complications, and to work with other members of their team.

Other surveys have shown that almost half of the American people think that the quality of health care has gone down over the last five years. A survey of health care consumers about the number of nursing errors was also taken, and consumers said that the conditions most affecting nursing error were stress from workload, not enough time spent with patients, and not enough nurses.

More than half of the doctors surveyed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 believed that nursing shortages were one of the major reasons for medical errors. Another study in the 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that thousands of patient lives are lost each year because of the nursing shortage. And another investigation showed that every patient added to a hospital nurse's workload increased the risk of death for surgical patients by 7 percent.

Still other studies have found similar conditions. All of the data points to a crisis that needs to be addressed.

by: Jean Henshaw

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