In “Nurse Skill Mix, Nurse Staffing Level, and Physical Restraint Use in US Hospitals: a Longitudinal Study,” Cramer, Olds, Shorr, & Staggs (2017) intended to examine the relationship between nursing staffing and physical restraint. They wanted to find out if an increase of physical restraints at hospitals could be caused by understaffing. To perform a longitudinal analysis, researchers used 17 reports each quarter from the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. These reports provided information on the prevalence of restraint in acute care hospitals across the United States as well as statistics about staffing for these facilities. Researchers focused their research on “physical restraints for all reasons” and not those that are designed to prevent patients falling. Study results showed that physical restraints are more likely to be used by units having a greater mean skill mix. In addition, the chances of restraint were greater when a unit’s quarterly skill mix was below its average level across study quarters, but not substantially lower when a unit’s quarterly skill mix was high or very high compared to average” (Cramer, Olds, Shorr, & Staggs, 2017). The researchers concluded that hospitals with enough skilled personnel were less likely to cause patients physical hardship.
Because the article was created within the last five years, it is up-to-date and pertinent. Since the research methodology is wide, objective writing is possible. This study covers a variety of subjects, even universities which did not submit mandatory reports. It is clear that the article’s strength lies in its desire to explore a new topic. The researchers acknowledge that “the relationship between staffing levels and restraint usage in hospitals hasn’t been well researched and previous research results are inconclusive due to insufficient control for unobserved variations among units” (e.g. patient mix). Our objective was to investigate the relationship between nurse staffing level and skill mix and the usage of restraints (Cramer, Olds, Shorr, &Staggs, 2017). The most important factor in predicting restraint usage is “skill mixture”, not total staffing levels. This is the weakest aspect of the study (Cramer, Olds, Shorr, &Staggs, 2017).
The article “Appropriate Nursing Staffing Levels in the U.S. Nursing Homes,” Harrington et al. (2020) Assess the staffing situation of nursing homes across the United States. This article aims to provide guidance on how to determine if a facility is adequately staffed with nurses (Harrington and al. 2020). Researchers recommend nursing homes to “determine collective resident acuity, care needs, identify appropriate nurses staffing level for residents’ care requirements, examine evidence about the adequacy staffing, identify gaps between staffing and appropriate nursing nursing staffing amounts based on resident severity” (Harrington, et al. 2020). This formula is believed to accurately reflect facility personnel needs.
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