Nursing Shortage: Its Effect on Patient Outcome

In today's environment of rising costs in the health care industry, one of the first casualties in many hospitals is the level of RN staffing. In fact, across the country, hospital RNs are increasingly forced to work in an atmosphere in which they are understaffed, overworked, and charged with responsibilities wholly unrelated to direct patient care. This is a phenomenon illustrated in alarming detail in the article "Identifying Nurse Staffing and Patient Outcome Relationships: A Guide for Change in Care Delivery," published in the July-August, 2003 issue of Nursing Economics, in which a solid connection between inadequate RN staffing and negative patient outcomes is presented.

Most RN's are acutely aware of the negative repercussions they experience personally as a result of understaffing -- particularly in acute health care units. Most also realize that this understaffing is the result of the popular administrative notion...
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