Nurses have always been life-givers who remain unsung heroes in the medical field. Yet it is with their incessant and selfless care that a patient recovers and gets the right treatment at the right time. With the ongoing pandemic, the role of nurses has gained even more significance as the world grapples for breath.
Today, i.e., 12 May is celebrated as International Nurses Day which marks the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale. The World Health Organization has declared the years 2020–21 as the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife to honor the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. Nightingale’s innovative work with statistics showed the importance of hospital hygiene in preventing deaths, and how trained nurses were associated with reduced hospital deaths.
To add to what Nightingale had claimed all those years back, new research suggests that patient harm can be further reduced by investments in nurse staffing.
This study was conducted across 55 hospitals in Queensland, Australia. It suggests that a recent state policy to introduce a minimum ratio of one nurse to four patients for day shifts has successfully improved patient care, with a 7% drop in the chance of death and readmission, and a 3% reduction in length of stay for everyone less patient a nurse has on their workload.
Likewise, a similar study of more than 400,000 patients and 17,000 nurses in 27 hospitals that implemented the policy and 28 comparison hospitals has been published in The Lancet.
The research further reads that in 2016, 27 public hospitals in Queensland were required to instate a minimum of one dedicated nurse for every four patients during day shifts and one for every seven patients for night shifts on medical-surgical wards. They also collected data from 28 other hospitals in the state that did not do the same, at baseline in 2016 and at follow-up in 2018 (two years after the policy was implemented). This only included nurses in direct contact with adult patients in medical-surgical wards.
They assessed demographics, diagnoses, and discharge details for patients, as well as the length of the hospital stay using the patient data which were then linked to death records for 30 days following discharge, and to readmissions within seven days of discharge.
That concluded that the chances of being readmitted increased by 6% in the comparison hospitals over time, but stayed the same in hospitals that implemented the policy. To be precise, between 2016 and 2018, the length of stay fell by 5% in the hospitals that did not implement the policy and by 9% in hospitals that did.
All that combined came down to the fact that when nurse workloads improved by one less patient per nurse, the chance of death and readmissions fell by 7%, and the length of hospital stay dropped by 3%.
If we talk about India, then we have 37.6 health workers for every 10,000 people while the WHO (World Health Organization) benchmark is a minimum of 44.5.
Nonetheless, India has the highest number of medical colleges in the world, and the second-highest number of doctors globally. But given the population of 1.3 billion, the doctor-patient ratio is abysmal—nine doctors per 10,000 people as against 42 in Germany, 28 in the UK, and 26 in the US. Similarly, though India has around 3.2 million nurses and produces 335,000 nursing professionals every year through 5,085 institutes, there are only 15 nurses for 10,000 people. The UK has 150, Germany – 132, and the US – 85.