Relating nursing workload to quality of care in child and adolescent mental health inpatient services

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a simple tool that enables inpatient psychiatric adolescent units to relate patient dependency to the number of nursing staff needed to give a defined level of care. Recorded at the same time was the number of nurses on each shift, and if they felt there were enough of them. A simple measure of what the ward felt like and if the nurses felt they had been therapeutic was also made for each shift. Some results are presented and an attempt made to relate the number of staff needed to give a certain quality of care in the context of rising dependency levels.

Design/methodology/approach

An observational study collecting quantitative data including patient dependency, staffing and staff satisfaction. These were recorded daily for three years.

Findings

Results show that when there is high dependency in the ward, if there are not enough nurses, then quality of care suffers. For our ward, a minimum of 11 nurses are needed to cover each 24 hours and more if the dependency levels go up. If there are less than 11 nurses then the quality of care suffers.

Originality/value

Makes a strong connection between workload, staffing and care quality in a specific care group.

Citation

Ridley, C. (2007), "Relating nursing workload to quality of care in child and adolescent mental health inpatient services", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 429-440. https://doi.org/10.1108/09526860710763343