Abstract
Opening a new hospital poses a complex and consequential set of challenges. One of these challenges is to estimate the nursing staff. The aim of this article is to report the entire process adopted to estimate the required nursing staff for a new Hospital in Brazil. The nursing staff was projected according to the Brazilian Federal Nursing Council (Cofen). We applied an equation to estimate nursing staff and compared the results with two other existing hospitals. A significant difference (p<0.05) was observed when comparing the Nurse-License Practice Nurse ratio recommended by Cofen between the new Hospital and other hospitals. This statistical difference is mostly due to reduced nurse staff in intensive care units. Almost one year after the hospital opened its doors, it is necessary to review nursing staff hours with the real information to reinforce the expenditure on these personnel and to evaluate the decisions made so far.
Highlights
Opening a new hospital is a major, complex, and consequential challenge
To determine how many registered nurse (RN) and licensed practical nurse (LPN) were necessary in the inpatient care units, we considered the nursing services, the patient population and the hospital facility itself
Regarding the nursing staff approved by the MDH board, the total number of individuals in the staff was similar to the numbers suggested by Consejo Federal de Enfermería de Brasil (Cofen) and applied by Bench 1 and Bench 2
Summary
One important issue in any hospital is the nursing staff. It is known that few and low levels of registered nurse (RN) staff are associated with poor patient outcomes, such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, lengthy stays, upper gastrointestinal bleeding, shock and high rates of general infections[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. In some countries like Brazil and others in South America, the licensed practical nurse (LPN) is allowed to assist patients under RN supervision. This assistance includes basic tasks, ranging from cleaning and feeding patients to administration of all kinds of medications, including intravenous ones.
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