Time Required to perform Selected Nursing Care Activities with A View to determine the Nursing Manpower Requirement in PICU

Abstract

The lack of unequivocal decision on the nurse patient ratio at the global level raises the issue to measure the required nurse patient ratio at all levels. Adequate nurse staffing levels are a fundamental prerequisite for satisfactory pediatric care. So, the aims of the study were 1. To analyze the time required to perform selected nursing care activities 2. To determine the nursing manpower requirement in PICU 3. To compare the time taken to perform selected nursing care among ventilated and non-ventilated patients. A descriptive, quantitative study was done in the PICU of St John's Medical College Hospital, Bangalore.9 staff nurses those who met the inclusion criteria were enrolled in to the study by purposive sampling technique. 39 activities which were routinely carried out in PICU were observed. The observation was performed in all three different shifts. The previous 6 months census were recorded for calculating the average number of patients in a day. The primary outcome was to calculate the time required to perform the nursing care activities with a view to calculate the nursing manpower requirement. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study shows that the total time required to perform nursing care activities for a ventilated patient is 16.18 hours and for a non-ventilated patient is 12.16 hours. The nursing manpower calculated by using Arndt Huckabay formula revealed that nursing manpower required in PICU is 26, whereas currently there are 22 staff nurses working for providing holistic care to the patients. Also, the comparison between the time taken to perform nursing care activities in ventilated and non-ventilated patients revealed that ventilated patients require more time for nursing care activities than non-ventilated patients.