Staffing critical care with nurses amid the COVID-19 crisis: Strategies and plans

To describe a nursing staffing surge model in critical care units that can be used during a pandemic or crisis. This model may give useful guidance for hospitals or centers that must immediately react in response to the devastating challenges introduced by disease outbreaks.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many hospitals were challenged to maintain the quality of care and safe practice in critical care units while accommodating the daily rapidly increasing number of infected cases that needed critical care. The nursing staffing shortage in critical care units and its consequences were among the top issues to deal with.

This is a descriptive study about our experience in preparing for nursing staffing in critical care as a part of the COVID-19 surge plan. We have used evidence-based strategies to design our team-based model for staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team-based model for staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic had shown success in dealing with the acute shortage of nursing staff in critical care units. We had implemented other additional supportive strategies to help enhance this staffing.

With the support of available evidence-based resources and on-the-fly preparation and training, we were able to augment the tremendous increase in patient influx during the pandemic using the team-based model.

The team-based approach and other strategies included in this article can help support critical care units with staff during crises. However, we strongly recommend developing a nursing deployment policy that makes staff redeployment and re-allocation smoother, whenever needed.