Nursing Activities Score in the intensive care unit: analysis of the related factors

High costs of intensive care as well as quality of care and patient safety demand measurement of nursing workload in order to determine nursing staff requirements. It is also important to be aware of the factors related to high patient care demands in order to help forecast staff requirements in intensive care units (ICUs).

To describe nursing workload using the Nursing Activities Score (NAS); to explore the association between NAS and patients variables, i.e. gender, age, length of stay (LOS), ICU discharge, treatment in the ICU, Simplified Acute Physiology Score II (SAPS II) and Therapeutic Interventions Scoring System-28 (TISS-28).

NAS, demographic data, SAPS II and TISS-28 were analysed among 200 patients from four different ICUs in a private hospital in São Paulo, Brazil.

NAS median were 66.4%. High NAS scores (> 66.4%) were associated with death (p-value 0.006) and LOS (p-value 0.015). Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that TISS-28 scores above 23 and SAPS II scores above 46.5 points, classified as high, increased 5.45 and 2.78 times, respectively, the possibility of a high workload as compared to lower values of the same indexes.

This study shows that the highest NAS scores were associated with increased mortality, LOS, severity of the patient illness (SAPS II), and particularly to TISS-28 in the ICU.