• Katia Grillo Padilha, Regina Márcia Cardoso de Sousa, Alda Ferreira Queijo, Ana Márcia Mendes, and Dinis Reis Miranda.
• School of Nursing, University of São Paulo, Av. Dr. Eneas de Carvalho Aguiar 419, CEP 05403-000, São Paulo SP, Brazil. kgpadilh@usp.br
• Intensive Crit Care Nurs. 2008 Jun 1;24(3):197-204.

BackgroundHigh costs of intensive care as well as quality of care and patient safety demand measurement of nursing workload in order to determine nursing staff requirements. It is also important to be aware of the factors related to high patient care demands in order to help forecast staff requirements in intensive care units (ICUs).ObjectivesTo describe nursing workload using the Nursing Activities Score (NAS); to explore the association between NAS and patients variables, i.e. gender, age, length of stay (LOS), ICU discharge, treatment in the ICU, Simplified Acute Physiology Score II (SAPS II) and Therapeutic Interventions Scoring System-28 (TISS-28).MethodsNAS, demographic data, SAPS II and TISS-28 were analysed among 200 patients from four different ICUs in a private hospital in São Paulo, Brazil.ResultsNAS median were 66.4%. High NAS scores (> 66.4%) were associated with death (p-value 0.006) and LOS (p-value 0.015). Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that TISS-28 scores above 23 and SAPS II scores above 46.5 points, classified as high, increased 5.45 and 2.78 times, respectively, the possibility of a high workload as compared to lower values of the same indexes.ConclusionThis study shows that the highest NAS scores were associated with increased mortality, LOS, severity of the patient illness (SAPS II), and particularly to TISS-28 in the ICU.

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