Scholarly Evidence

Governmental Objectives:
-- Creation of new nursing jobs.
-- Improvement of nurses ability to deliver proper levels of care.
-- Improved patient outcomes.
-- Ensuring lower costs to the hospital and patient by reducing nursing errors due to understaffing.

Political Influences:
-- Placing more regulation on hospitals in order to make them conform to realistic individual patient needs.
-- Setting a precedent that government regulations play a larger role in and have expanded powers over hospitals.
-- Creating a penal system for hospitals that get fined if they do not abide, while also creating a population of evaluators who ensure that hospitals are abiding to this bill.


How it affects the client:

A client is safer the more nurses there are on staff

A study completed by Aiken et al focused on the relationship between patient-to-nurse ratios and patient mortality. They found out that each additional patient a nurse was supposed to look after resulted in a 7% increase in the failure of the nurse to rescue that patient (Garrett, 2008).

How it affects the nurses:

Short staffing furthers nurse fatigue and occupational dissatisfaction

Poll of more than ten thousand nurses nationwide:
73% of nurses asked don’t believe the staffing on their unit or shift is sufficient.
59.8% of those asked said they knew of someone who left direct care nursing due to concerns about safe staffing.
48.2% would not feel confident having someone close to them receiving care in the facility where they work (South Carolina Nurses Association, 2008).


How it affects the health care system:

When the nurse-to-patient ratio is lowered, hospital acquired complications are reduced, thereby reducing costs.

Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is more likely to develop on a vent patient when there are fewer nurses on duty. The cost to treat a 10-day ventilator patient would increase from $10,000 to $40,000 if the patient were to develop VAP (McCoy, 2007).


Garrett, C. (2008). The effect of nurse staffing patterns on medical errors and nurse burnout. AORN, 87(6), 1191-1204.

McCoy, K. (2007). More hospital nurses mean fewer infections. HealthDay Consumer
News Service.

South Carolina Nurses Association (2008). ANA launches safe staffing activities: What are the ANA safe staffing principles? The South Carolina Nurse, 15(3), 1-2.