Balancing nurses' workload in hospital wards: study protocol of developing a method to manage workload

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Nursing Administration
• Operational Excellence

Background:

• Hospitals face competing goals: patient service, care quality, operational efficiency, and staff retention.
• Balancing patient needs with nursing staff capacity is crucial for achieving these goals.
• Existing nursing workload management methods lack key features like ease of interpretation, prospective planning capabilities, and comprehensive nurse support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel nursing workload management method.
• To create a tool that is easy to interpret, requires minimal additional registration, and is applicable across various hospital wards.
• To ensure the method is supported by nurses, covers all their activities, and facilitates prospective nursing staff planning.

Main Methods:

• A Delphi study with staff nurses to identify patient characteristics influencing care time.
• A time study to quantify nurses' activities, including patient-related and non-patient-related tasks.
• Combining data to estimate care time per patient group and overall nursing workload.

Main Results:

• The study aims to estimate care time per patient group and nurses' time spent on non-patient-related activities.
• The developed method will provide an estimate of nurses' workload by comparing required time with available nursing resources.
• The research will be conducted in 6 surgical wards of an academic hospital in the Netherlands.

Conclusions:

• A new nursing workload management method will be developed in close collaboration with end-users (nurses and ward management).
• This user-centered approach is expected to enhance support for the new method.
• The developed method is anticipated to be advantageous for planning purposes, unlike existing retrospective methods.