Hola a tod@s, my dear friends
Just published in Critical Care Medicine, today we want to share an article which comes to talk about something that could be thought by anyone without being an ICU healthcare professional. We were talking about this on January (To more nurses, less mortality). And we will talking for sure.
Patient Mortality Is Associated With Staff Resources and Workload in the ICU, is a multicentric observational study carried out in Lyon (France) which aimed to demonstrate that human resources and workload directly influence the mortality of ICU patients.
Join the ratios to the needs of patients is to talk about safety and quality. With suitable ratios nurse-patient and physician-patient are minimized errors and survival increases. Despite this obvious, appropriate ratios even not have been established.
In this study, with more than 6000 ICU stays in eight ICUs, the authors found that the risk of dying increased by 3.5 when the nurse ratio was greater than 2.5 (5 patients for 2 nurses) and it´s doubled if an intensivist was responsible of more than 14 patients. The worst ratios occurred on weekend for nurses and by night for physicians.
High turnover of patients and the number of life-sustaining procedures carried out by the team also associated with a higher mortality.
Humanized clinical management should be one of the engines of change, caring for the caregiver by offering the worker the best conditions for the development of the profession, as in any other work. And it should not rely on ideas or political parties, but it should be a matter of long-term planning and based on the opinion of professionals.
An adequate staff resource reduces the stay in the ICU, hospital stay, drug costs and improves satisfaction of users and professionals, who would probably have less absenteeism. That is the result of investment in professionals willing to work.
Happy Tuesday,
Gabi
"An adequate staff resource reduces the stay in the ICU, hospital stay, drug costs and improves satisfaction of users and professionals, who would probably have less absenteeism."
This is important. We all want less time in a hospital if we have to be there, to be with medical staff that is compassionate and quality care.