Abstract
Two of the issues facing the South African Health Care System are the shortage of nursing staff and a lack of adequate skills to provide quality patient care. The hospital under study experienced a critical shortage of applications from professional registered nurses, consequently a staffing strategy was implemented to overcome the shortage of nurses and to maintain quality patient care. The strategy introduced encouraged nurses to voluntarily work an additional ten hours per week with remuneration. A non-experimental, descriptive design with a quantitative approach was applied to investigate the effect of a staffing strategy aimed at improving the quality of care in a hospital in Kwa-Zulu Natal based on voluntarily increasing staff working hours. The investigation compared the quality of nursing care before and after the implementation of the staffing strategy through retrospective audits of randomly selected patient files 372 (11%) of the total population of 400 files were audited. A random sample of 4 boxes each containing a 100 patient files, of a total of 34 boxes, was selected from the hospital filing system. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed and correlations between various variables using the Chi-square test. No statistically significant differences (p<0.05) were found between the quality of nursing care before and after the implementation of the management strategy, even though deterioration of results after the implementation was observed. The study shows that the quality of nursing care in most wards deteriorated after implementation. The staffing strategy failed to improve or maintain the quality of nursing care.
Highlights
Two o f the issues facing the South Af rican Health Care System are the short age o f nursing staff and a lack o f ad equate skills to provide quality patient care
In June 2003 the hospital under study experienced a critical shortage of applications from professional reg istered nurses, a staff ing strategy was implemented to over come the shortage o f nurses and to maintain quality patient care
No statistically significant results were found between nursing care before and after the implementation of the staffing strategy
Summary
Two o f the issues facing the South Af rican Health Care System are the short age o f nursing staff and a lack o f ad equate skills to provide quality patient care. In June 2003 the hospital under study experienced a critical shortage of applications from professional reg istered nurses, a staff ing strategy was implemented to over come the shortage o f nurses and to maintain quality patient care. The South African Nursing Council (SANC) believes that “quality nursing practice is based on adequate knowl edge, skills or competencies, ethically and scientifically based comprehensive and holistic patient care, timely/accu rate and complete or comprehensive recording” (SANC, n.d: iv). Process standards include the steps o f the nurs ing process that are concerned with patient care delivery, assessment, care planning and implementation (Muller, 2004:204-5). Standard setting and evaluation is used for high-risk nursing activities, such as medication administration, patient dis charge, record keeping, patients’
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