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ABSTRACT: Background
To date, there are no valid statistics regarding the number of full time staff necessary for nursing care in emergency departments in Europe.Material and methods
Staff requirement calculations were performed using state-of-the art procedures which take both fluctuating patient volume and individual staff shortfall rates into consideration. In a longitudinal observational study, the average nursing staff engagement time per patient was assessed for 503 patients. For this purpose, a full-time staffing calculation was estimated based on the five priority levels of the Manchester Triage System (MTS), taking into account specific workload fluctuations (50th-95th percentiles).Results
Patients classified to the MTS category red (n = 35) required the most engagement time with an average of 97.93 min per patient. On weighted average, for orange MTS category patients (n = 118), nursing staff were required for 85.07 min, for patients in the yellow MTS category (n = 181), 40.95 min, while the two MTS categories with the least acute patients, green (n = 129) and blue (n = 40) required 23.18 min and 14.99 min engagement time per patient, respectively. Individual staff shortfall due to sick days and vacation time was 20.87% of the total working hours. When extrapolating this to 21,899 (2010) emergency patients, 67-123 emergency patients (50-95% percentile) per month can be seen by one nurse. The calculated full time staffing requirement depending on the percentiles was 14.8 to 27.1.Conclusion
Performance-oriented staff planning offers an objective instrument for calculation of the full-time nursing staff required in emergency departments.
SUBMITTER: Graff I
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4854466 | biostudies-literature | 2016
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Gräff Ingo I Goldschmidt Bernd B Glien Procula P Klockner Sophia S Erdfelder Felix F Schiefer Jennifer Lynn JL Grigutsch Daniel D
PloS one 20160503 5
<h4>Background</h4>To date, there are no valid statistics regarding the number of full time staff necessary for nursing care in emergency departments in Europe.<h4>Material and methods</h4>Staff requirement calculations were performed using state-of-the art procedures which take both fluctuating patient volume and individual staff shortfall rates into consideration. In a longitudinal observational study, the average nursing staff engagement time per patient was assessed for 503 patients. For thi ...[more]