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Shaping Funding Policy for Nursing Services
by Plummer, Virginia
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Abstract
This chapter is about the major policy issue of nursing resource allocation for hospitals. Health service executives have different views about whether systems based on ratios or those based on patient dependency are more accurate. This chapter reports on a statistical analysis of almost 2 million hours of nursing data provided by 22 acute care public and private hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. The TrendCare informatics system was selected because it has the capacity to simultaneously measure nurse patient ratios and nursing workloads by a dependency method of nursing hours per patient day. The results showed that TrendCare predicts actual direct nursing care requirements with greater accuracy than ratios for all hospital and patient types, facilitating better allocation of nursing resources and demonstrating that the cost of nursing care would be less for hospitals using that system than for ratios. This is an important outcome for nursing informatics.
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