[Number of nursing care hours in an intensive care unit]

The adequate sizing of the nursing staff in intensive care units has been one of the main concerns for the nurses that work in them, in spite of different classification models for patients that have been proposed at the domestic and international levels. In the present case study, the goals were to establish the average time spent in direct nursing assistance in an ICU and to calculate the average number of hours of direct nursing assistance delivered to its patients. In order to do that, the first step was to classify the nursing procedures carried out with ICU patients according to their complexity: low, medium and high. Next, the average time spent in theses procedures was counted during a three-month period, in order to find out the average time of direct nursing assistance delivered to patients.