It is amazing to me that people outside of hospitals are just now figuring this out - nurses who work in hospitals have known this for years.
Weekends and evening/night shifts are always less staffed; there are more patient falls, more medication errors, more complications, more adverse incidents of every kind, because there are less nurses. Ironically, the only type of hospital admissions that occur on weekends and evening/night shifts are emergency admissions - planned admissions only occur during the day, when there is enough staff. (Translation: enough surgeons scheduling surgery).
As already stated by another RN in this post, I have stayed overnight with both of my parents when they had major surgery, and the nursing staff of those units were grateful to have me there - one less patient they had to focus on.
The night my father had his surgery, there were 2 nurses on duty for 30 patients, and there were 6 emergency surgical admissions, in addition to the regularly scheduled surgical patients from that day. This was a small, private for-profit hospital in NY in an affluent area, 20 miles from Manhattan. That hospital had jobs posted for night shift charge nurses, starting pay $70,000/year, in 2001, and they still couldn't hire enough night shift nurses. You can only imagine how bad the staffing is in rural, inner-city and municpal-run not-for-profit hospitals.
The article mentions interns working long hours, not enough attending physicians available weekends and evening/night shifts, but it is the poor nurse-to-patient ration that is the problem, not the availability (or lack of availability) of interns and residents.
The American Nurses Association, as well as dozens of nursing schools, have done study after study that show improved patient outcomes are directly related to the the number of registered nurses available. Length of stay, the number of hospital acquired infections, surgical complications, patient falls, and amazingly, nursing staff turnover all decrease when there are enough nurses at the bedside.
Hospitals are set up for the care and comfort of physicians, specifically, surgeons. What may be best for the nurse, and certainly, what is best for the patient, is always secondary.
Discuss