Patient experience and nurse staffing level in South Korea

Patient experience has recently become a key driver for hospital quality improvement in South Korea, marked by the introduction of the Patient Experience Assessment (PXA) within its National Health Insurance in 2017. While the PXA has garnered special attention from the media and hospitals, there has been a lack of focus on its structural determinants, hindering continuous and sustained improvement in patient experience. Given the relatively low number of practicing nurses per 1000 population in South Korea and the significant variation in nurse staffing levels across hospitals, the staffing level of nurses in hospitals could be a crucial structural determinant of patient experience. This study examines the association between patient experience and hospital nurse staffing levels in South Korea. We used individual- and hospital-level data from the 2019 PXA, encompassing 7250 patients from 42 tertiary hospitals and 16 235 patients from 109 non-tertiary general hospitals with 300 or more beds. The dependent variables were derived from the complete set of 21 proper questions on patient experience in the Nurse and other domains. The main explanatory variable was the hospital-level Nurse Staffing Grade (NSG), employed by the National Health Insurance to adjust reimbursement to hospitals. Multilevel ordered/binomial logistic or linear regression was conducted accounting for other hospital- and patient-level characteristics as well as acknowledging the nested nature of the data. A clear, positive association was observed between patient experience in the Nurse domain and NSG, even after accounting for other characteristics. For example, the predicted probability of reporting the top-box category of "Always" to the question "How often did nurses treat you with courtesy and respect?" was 70.3% among patients from non-tertiary general hospitals with the highest NSG, compared to 63.1% among patients from their peer hospitals with the lowest NSG. Patient experience measured in other domains that were likely to be affected by nurse staffing levels also showed similar associations, although generally weaker and less consistent than in the Nurse domain. Better patient experience was associated with higher hospital nurse staffing levels in South Korea. Alongside current initiatives focused on measuring and publicly reporting patient experience, strengthening nursing and other hospital workforce should also be included in policy efforts to improve patient experience.