Nurse staffing and patient safety

Safe, effective and ethical nurse staffing requires that there is a sufficient number and appropriate use and mix of competent nurses available to care for patients. Because of its close connections with patient safety, nurse staffing has become an important concern for governments, health-care providers and the public. This article provides highlights from the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation research report Evaluation of Patient Safety and Nurse Staffing (2005), which focused on the connections between nurse staffing and patient safety. The report findings were discussed at a roundtable of decision-makers and experts, and these deliberations and the literature evidence were used to create the final synthesis. The authors present one of the key recommendations for nurse staffing that arose from the synthesis.