How many nurses do we need? A review and discussion of operational research techniques applied to nurse staffing

Despite a long history of health services research that indicates that having sufficient nursing staff on hospital wards is critical for patient safety, and sustained interest in nurse staffing methods, there is a lack of agreement on how to determine safe staffing levels. For an alternative viewpoint, we look to a separate body of literature that makes use of operational research techniques for planning nurse staffing. Our goal is to provide examples of the use of operational research approaches applied to nurse staffing, and to discuss what they might add to traditional methods. The paper begins with a summary of traditional approaches to nurse staffing and their limitations. We explain some key operational research techniques and how they are relevant to different nurse staffing problems, based on examples from the operational research literature. We identify three key contributions of operational research techniques to these problems: "problem structuring", handling complexity and numerical experimentation. We conclude that decision-making about nurse staffing could be enhanced if operational research techniques were brought in to mainstream nurse staffing research. There are also opportunities for further research on a range of nurse staff planning aspects: skill mix, nursing work other than direct patient care, quantifying risks and benefits of staffing below or above a target level, and validating staffing methods in a range of hospitals.