• Intensive Crit Care Nurs · Apr 2010

    Nursing workload and staff allocation in an intensive care unit: a pilot study according to Nursing Activities Score (NAS).

    • Katia Grillo Padilha, Regina Márcia Cardoso de Sousa, Paulo Carlos Garcia, Sheila Tosta Bento, Eva Maria Finardi, and Regina H K Hatarashi.
    • School of Nursing, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. kgpadilh@usp.br
    • Intensive Crit Care Nurs. 2010 Apr 1;26(2):108-13.

    ObjectivesThe objectives of the study were to identify the daily nursing workload in an intensive care unit (ICU) and to analyse the adequacy of nursing staff in a six hour shift according to the Nursing Activities Score (NAS).MethodThe sample consisted of 68 patients from a general 25-bed adult ICU in a private hospital with 250 beds in São Paulo, Brazil. The nursing workload of all patients admitted in the ICU over a one month period in 2004 were measured daily according to the NAS. For the analysis of nursing staff it was considered the number of nurses available in a six hour shift. Data were submitted to descriptive analyses.ResultsMost patients were elderly and remained on average 12 (+/-16.4) days in the ICU. The mean NAS was 63.7 (+/-2.4%) and remained above 58.5% throughout the month. Apart from the 16th day of data collection there was an excess of nursing professionals in a six hour shift during the study period (range from 0.8 to 4.8 professionals).ConclusionsThe study results show the importance of nursing staff adequacy to workload fluctuations for reducing ICU costs.Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…