Aims: Studies have shown concerns of hospital under staffing of nurse care for patients and the increase of medical risk. One nurse less than the standard care ratio, the likelihood of mortality and the odds of failure-to-rescue may increase for 7% within 30-day admission. The Department of Health (DOH) in Taiwan implemented several nursing care programs to improve the care quality. This study aimed to investigate the nursing manpower among hospitals, and to explore whether the affiliation of additional lay care giver improved patient care quality.
Methods: We conducted a comparison study between 3-study wards and 5 non-study wards in 5 hospitals for “the total nursing health care program of DOH”. We used the nursing station reports to observe the nursing manpower deployment, patient severity, and patient outcome for one or two month.
In the meanwhile, we used the zero-inflated Poisson regression model to conduct empirical analysis, and to check the effect of nursing skill mix model on patient care outcome.
Result: A total of 1471 eligible questionnaires were collected from nurses and analysed. We measuring the nursing care outcome by measuring the 8 job-related mistakes. We found that raising work hours and number of nurses had reduced the negative patient outcomes. On the other hand, the lay care givers could not decrease negative outcomes.
Conclusion: In the ward with more nurses and more work hours, the negative outcomes are decreased. Nurses are important manpower to improve the quality of care. We should enhance the number of nurse besides keeping the original to reduce negative outcome, and improve care quality.
Key words: nursing skill mix, patient care outcome, nursing manpower deployment, care giver
