Identifying wards for which the Safer Nursing Care Tool is appropriate for assessing nurse staffing requirements

Principal Investigator: Dr Christina Saville

Team members: Dr Christina Saville (Research Fellow, University of Southampton) Professor Peter Griffiths (Chair of Health Services Research, School of Health Sciences, University of Southampton), Rosemary Chable RN (Deputy Director of Nursing, Education & Workforce, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust)  Ms Nicky Sinden (Head of Nursing Workforce at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust), Tracy Moran (Lead Nurse for Nursing Workforce, Education & Practice, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust)

Start: 1 December 2019 Ends: 1 August 2020 

Partners:

University of Southampton, Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Lay summary

It is important to have enough qualified (registered) nurses looking after patients staying on hospital wards, because having too few is associated with worse patient care and more patient deaths. On the other hand, there are extreme shortages of nurses, so having “too many” on a ward could be considered a waste. The Safer Nursing Care Tool is used in many hospital wards in England to work out the number of nursing staff (including nursing assistants) needed. However, a recent study showed that it is more suitable on some wards than on others. For example, we found that factors not accounted for in the tool, e.g. whether a ward is surgical or medical, and the proportion of single rooms, also affected professional judgement of whether staffing was adequate.

Aim

This study aims to understand which ward characteristics mean that the Safer Nursing Care Tool gives a good estimate of the nursing staff required, and which ward characteristics mean that the number might need to be adjusted or further considered by taking into account the expertise of ward leaders. It also aims, if possible, to provide some general rules or an add-on tool to help nursing managers with setting staffing levels.

Methods

We will analyse the data that were collected for a previous study in a different way. This time we will focus on differences between wards rather than hospitals. We will use analytical techniques for finding patterns in data to identify similar wards. In our team we have experienced leaders in nursing who will provide expert professional insights into ward characteristics.

Patient, public and community involvement and sharing results

We will involve nursing managers in the study because they are the potential users of any rules or tools we develop. We plan to develop a resource (rules or a tool) for nursing ward managers and to run a workshop to test use of this resource. We plan to write one academic paper about what we find out. We also can share the plans for this with lay members from the PPI group as appropriate. We are developing a smaller user group across Workforce and Frailty and Older People teams.