Nurse Staffing in Acute Care Settings: Research Perspectives and Practice Implications

In the face of a deepening nursing shortage, many facilities are likely to find that various aspects of staffing, such as coverage, licensure levels, and experience, are lower than those historically in place. Advance planning by staff and supervisors and careful monitoring of outcomes are needed to ensure patient safety. Health care managers and executives need to benchmark staffing levels and nursing-sensitive outcomes in their facilities, carefully analyze recruitment and retention issues, and develop short- and long-term strategies for averting and dealing with the shortfalls in numbers and skill mix of nursing personnel that they will likely face increasingly in the coming decades.