Approaches of acuity-informed staffing have indeed proved to be relevant in improving the outcomes of patients and further enhancing nurse's satisfaction. An understanding of the patients' need for care, organizational culture, and access to resources is a necessity for the right alignment between nurses and patients. The increasing healthcare costs lead to reduced budgets for healthcare organizations, which affect patient care hours directly. The subjectivity of the earlier acuity system necessitated the extra nurse effort. Current acuity systems, however, can retrieve information from the electronic medical record to create reliable, valid, and objective acuity scores that benefit staff, patients, and hospital budgets (Hickson, Steinke, Skitterall and Williams, 2017).
Most hospital facilities have adopted the triple aim of better quality care, access, and lower costs. The acuity tool is, therefore, used to enhance and improve nurse satisfaction and increase their perception of patient safety. The tool shows recordings of clinical patient characteristics and nurse workload indicators (Hickson et al., 2017). It, therefore, accounts for both the nurses and the patients to enhance quality care.
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The nurses' vigilance enhances patient safety at the bedside of the patients. If the number of patients per nurse increases, then the patients are liable to be exposed to increased risks of morbidity and mortality. An example of an aspect that shows the relationship between patient safety and nursing workload is the nurse to patient ratio (Sir, Dundar, Steege & Pasupathy, 2015). These inpatient mortality ratios can be reduced in cases where the nurses in charge of surgical patients are highly educated. The nature of the nurses' work is highly intensified, which makes the nurses likely to commit errors when providing their routine care. The working conditions for the nurses should, therefore, be suitable as possible to effectively carry out the complex tasks (Sir et al., 2015). When the nurse is exposed to too much pressure from the physician, it may result in nurses leaving their jobs and nurse burnout.
References
Hickson, R. P., Steinke, D. T., Skitterall, C., & Williams, S. D. (2017). Evaluation of a pharmaceutical assessment screening tool to measure patient acuity and prioritize pharmaceutical care in a UK hospital. Eur J Hosp Pharm , 24 (2), 74-79.
Sir, M. Y., Dundar, B., Steege, L. M. B., & Pasupathy, K. S. (2015). Nurse–patient assignment models considering patient acuity metrics and nurses’ perceived workload. Journal of biomedical informatics , 55 , 237-248.
