PATIENT TO NURSE RATIO IN HOSPITALS - Research Paper Example

The first group of subjects examined consisted of 2585 patients that had utilized mechanical ventilation following admission for pneumonia treatment or for more than two days irrespective of diagnosis made at the time of admission. The research subjects, categorized on the basis of varying staffing levels were taken into account during the study. Results from the study showed that 393 patients developed pneumonia out of the 1658 subjects that were in the secondary group. This amounted to a percentage of 23.7. In study groups with PNRs of 1:1, 2:1, 2.

5:1, and 3:1 units with patient to nurse ratios of 1 to 1, 2 to 1, 2.5 to 1, and 3 to 1, the rates of pneumonia development were 9.3 percent, 25.7 percent, 18.7 percent and 24.2 percent in that order. Overall, the study showed that after adjustment for contradictory variables, PNRs of more than 1:1 were not associated with elevated risk for pneumonia linked to ventilator usage. The conclusion, therefore, was that even though a 1:1 ratio is associated with a reduced risk of ventilator-linked pneumonia, adjustment of the variables reduces the significance of the difference.

The second article under scrutiny is titled “Patient-to-Nurse Ratios and Outcomes of Moderately Preterm Infants” and is written by Profit et al. (2010). The research article begins by denoting that, in many spheres of medicine, increased PNRs are linked to improved patient outcomes. The authors are keen to note that the impact of nurse-staffing on health outcomes of preterm babies has not been addressed in research. This clearly identifies the research gap and justifies the study. The objective of the study, therefore, was to examine the influence of PNRs on the outcome of healthcare afforded to fairly preterm babies.

In this study increase in nurse staffing was linked to a decline in the preterm infants’ weight gain each day. However, nurse-staffing in relation to the number of infants, as measured by the