Establishing Safe Staffing Patterns for Nursing

Session
Patient Flow

Author
Frank Overfelt
President
Delta Healthcare Consulting Group

Description
This presentation will depict the differences between developing safe staffing requirements for Nursing rather than arbitrary ratios and how much more effective those safe staffing requirements will be than benchmarked ratios

Abstract
There is much legislation being considered by the states and the federal government to arbitrarily set mandated staffing ratios in nursing. These mandatory ratios have no substantive documentation as underpinnings. This presentation will define the necessary underpinnings to develop staffing ratios which take into account the unique layout and design of facilites along with their use of Information Technology, Ancillary department Support and the dependency level of the patient.

Tools which have been used to develop such evidenced based staffing ratios include data collection, time standards, work sampling and other useful techniques, plus the use of patient classification systems.

The methodology, which will be defined, has been succesfully utilized in a variety of facilites to establish and maintain appropriate staffing levels. This methodology has also been used to define the impact of the implementation of information technology applications.