The Ontario nursing workload demonstration projects: rethinking how we measure, cost and plan the work of nurses

In 2008 the Nursing Secretariat of Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care formed a Nursing Workload Steering Committee to oversee the implementation of three demonstration projects with the objectives: to assess the feasibility of Health Outcomes for Better Information and Care (HOBIC) data as a measure of nursing workload, determine the indicators that best support nurse leaders to measure nursing work and make informed staffing decisions, and develop a model that predicts acute care nursing costs.

Three HOBIC scales--activities of daily living (ADLs), continence and fatigue--explained a small amount of the variance in nurse judgment of the amount of nursing time patients require in the first 24 hours of care. Nurses in the study appreciated providing their professional judgment to help estimate the nursing work requirements of patients. The priority and secondary indicators most important for decision-making included medical severity of patients, environmental complexity, nurse experience, patient turnover, nurse-to-patient ratio, cognitive status, infection control, nurse vacancy, predictability of patient types, nursing interventions, patient volumes, co-morbidities, patient self-care abilities, physical and psychosocial functioning, unit type and medical diagnosis. A fairly robust model was developed using existing data sources to estimate nursing input into a patient's costs. The model explained between 69% and 80% of the variation in nursing costs for each patient.

In order to effectively measure, plan and cost nursing, we need to determine what nursing is. In the future, recognition of nurses as knowledge workers will require us to consider the many patient and environmental factors that affect the ability of nurses to apply their professional judgment to care for patients.