The effects of human resources allocation and nursing workload on assistance results in intensive care units
This was a prospective, descriptive an quantitative study, performed with the aim of analyzing the effects of human resources allocation and nursing workload on the assistance results in two intensive care units (ICUs), a General one (General ICU) and Cardiovascular one (CV-ICU) with 25 beds each from a private hospital in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It was adopted a methodology able to reach 87% of the variation of care required by patients. This methodology was composed by items that include the both the biological and psychosocial dimension concerning care: o Patient Focused Solutions/Workload Measurement-Inpatient Methodology (PFS/WM-IM). It was considered result indicators such as fall, medication errors, unplanned extubation, unplanned withdrawal central venous catheter, unplanned withdrawal nasogastric probe, hospital acquired decubitus ulcer (PU), urinary tract infection (UTI) and pneumonia developed during hospital care. The data were collected from the medical reports and registers of the Commission for Hospital Infection Control, as well as the daily work schedule from the nursing staff. After 46 consecutive days of data collection, the final sample was composed by 328 patients - 166 in the General ICU and 162 in the CV-ICU. It was observed a predominance of male patients (about 56.0% in each unit), the presence of elderly aging 61 or more (65.1%) in the General ICU and 41-60 years in the CV-ICU (48.2%), who had undergone clinical treatment (54.8% in the General ICU and 79.6% in the CV-ICU) and admission average of 11.0 (±28.0) days and 14.2 ( 52.9) days in the General ICU and CV-ICU respectively. After the discharge, similar proportion of patients from both units (about 56.0%) was transferred to the admission unit. The mortality rate observed in this period was of 9.6% and 14.8% respectively in both units, General ICU and CV-ICU. With relation to the occurrence of adverse events (AEs), in the General ICU, 20 patients (12.0%) suffered 26 AEs, that is, 14 and 6 patients were victims of 1 and 2 events respectively. From these, 13 unplanned withdrawal nasogastric probe, 5 PU, 3 medication errors, 2 unplanned withdrawal central venous catheter, 2 pneumonias, 2 UTI and 1 unplanned extubation). In the CV-ICU, 9 patients (5.6%) suffered 14 AEs, that is, 5, 3 and 1 patients suffered 1, 2 and 3 AEs, respectively being 5 PU, 4 UTI, 2 medication errors, 2 pneumonias, 1 unplanned withdrawal nasogastric probe. The patients were predominantly classified into categories 4 and 5 (medium and high nursing care complexity). It was observed, in each ICU, on an average, 1 nurse for every 8 patients, 1 nurse technician for 2 patients the most. The average nursing hours available were higher than the recommended by the PFS/WM-IM, 15.3 and 13.4 in the General ICU and 16.4 and 14.1 hour in the CV-ICU (p<0,001) respectively. In the period analyzed, despite the exceeding of nursing staff in both General and CV-ICU ICUs, there were AEs. The results of this study meet, therefore, the frequent nurses' requests for more people in the ICU. However, the also point out the need of further investigations that may either confirm or not such results, aiming at appropriating a number of people who can assure both care quality and costs decrease in ICUs