Nursing: Essential to Healthcare Value

Nursing is a practice discipline and occurs as 1 nurse and 1 patient, family, or community at a time. The encounter between a nurse and patient forms a fundamental bond that defines, not only nursing as a profession, but each individual nurse as a provider of care. Nursing practice drives value, and nurses have a direct and intimate influence on the quality, safety, and costs of patient-centered care. If we define nursing value as the function of outcomes divided by costs,1 there is a need to better define the measures and analytics for patient-level costs and outcomes of nursing care. This fundamental shift to capture the patient or consumer impact of nursing care is an important expansion of how nursing value is quantified. This will require rethinking how we view nursing care delivery beyond solely measuring nursing in terms of tasks or ratios and staffing levels, to one that recognizes the individual and collective accomplishments and results provided by each nurse across the broad spectrum of care. True nursing value can only be described by measurement of the clinical and financial impact of nursing care.