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More Nurses in Hospitals May Equal Happier Patients

 No one looks forward to a hospital stay, but a new study suggests you may be happier with your visit if your hospital has more nurses per patient than other facilities.

 

The analysis of patient satisfaction surveys from nearly 2,500 hospitals across the United States also found that many people are pleased with hospitals in general—about 67% said they would definitely recommend their hospital to someone else.

 

Geographic locations matter too: People in Birmingham, Ala., were most satisfied with care; 71.9% gave their hospital a high rating. Those in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and East Long Island, N.Y., were the least satisfied; only 51.9% and 49.9%, respectively, highly rated their facilities.

 

One of the study researchers, Arnold M. Epstein, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, points out the findings don’t necessarily mean that patients are more satisfied with their care because there are more nurses on staff; instead, he says, relatively high nurse staffing levels may indicate that a hospital emphasizes the importance of interpersonal communications and treating patients with care and respect.

 

Also, these are likely the types of hospitals that are able to recruit nurses and keep them, say experts in the field.

 

“Nurses really are the face of health care,” says Deirdre Mylod, PhD, vice president of acute services at Press Ganey Associates, a South Bend, Ind.–based firm that administers patient satisfaction surveys and consults with hospitals on quality improvement.

 

“If nurses are engaged, they’re in an environment that fosters better patient care, and patients feel that,” says Mylod, who was not involved in the study. “When an organization is struggling with not enough nurses, you get burnout, you get more turnover, you get nurses who are less emotionally available to patients.”

 

In the study, Ashish K. Jha, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, and colleagues analyzed survey data from 2,429 hospitals.

 

Hospitals started giving the 27-question surveys to patients in October 2006 and reported the data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which has been struggling for years to find ways to measure hospitals’ quality of care. Asking patients what they think is a relatively new approach, and CMS began releasing the survey data in March 2008.

 

The researchers found that hospitals in the top 25%—in terms of the nurse-to-patient-per-day ratio—also received top marks for communication with nurses, nursing services, communication about medications, pain control, and discharge instructions, according to the report in The New England Journal of Medicine.

 

While 70.2% of patients at these hospitals said they would recommend them to others, 63.5% of patients at the hospitals with the lowest nurse-to-patient-per-day ratios said they too would recommend their facilities.

 

Patients were more satisfied with care at nonprofit hospitals as opposed to for-profit hospitals, but it didn’t seem to matter if it was a teaching facility or not.

“You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you’ll win, no matter what that outcome.”

The top 10 weirdest things in nurses’ pockets!

Scrubs pockets can be a nurse’s best friend—since you’ve only got two hands, you’ve gotta put everything somewhere! But we also know those pockets can lead to a few “oops” moments once you get home and empty them! We asked our Facebook fans for the strangest thing they’ve ever found in their pocket post-shift—check out their hilarious, slightly gross and even occasionally bawdy answers (and don’t forget to check your pockets before leaving work tonight)!

The top 10 weirdest things in nurses’ pockets!

1. A patient’s set of false teeth! Wrapped in a glove! Crazy but true!!!

 

2. I was on a 16-hour shift and had a patient with two necrotic toes. Near the end of the second half of the shift, I changed the patient’s foot dressing. As I took the old dressing off, off came a toe! I wrapped it in a 4×4 and called the supervisor. Long story short, I got home and emptied my pockets, and what did I pull out? You guessed it…THE TOE!

3. A tooth! Never did figure out how it got there…

4. A dried-up umbilical cord that a mother wanted to keep, but left it on the table. I called her and she came all the way back to pick it up!

5. A very small fake penis—we had to practice putting a new kind of condom cath on it. My grandson was the one who pulled it out of my pocket…I had some explaining to do, needless to say!

6. I was helping the doctor perform a thoracentesis, and the patient started coughing when his lung expanded. We all ducked from the bits of tumor that came flying, and thought we had found all the pieces…until the end of my shift, when I reached into my breast pocket. Ugh.

7. I kept hearing a crinkling, crackling noise and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from…until I was changing out of my scrubs. I had a wrapped baby bottle nipple stuck in the middle of my bra! (I’m a maternity nurse.) LOL!

8. A specimen cup with a stool sample in it. I was working in ED and it was very busy. I saw the order on the computer and so did another nurse. We both ended up getting a sample from the same patient, only she sent hers down to lab first. I saved mine just in case and forgot it was in my pocket when I got home. YUCK!!!

9. Wrist restraints…you should have seen my husband’s face when I pulled THOSE out!

10. A penis implant…loooonngg story!