Nurse Staffing Case Study

Adequate Staffing What should a nurse manager or nurse responsible for scheduler consider when faced with the complex issues of staffing a busy acute care unit? One of the first things to consider is the type of unit you are scheduling for and the acuity of patients. The unit that I will be scheduling for is an inpatient rehabilitation unit caring for patient’s that are post-surgery related to hip or knee replacements, cerebrovascular accident (CVA), or brain injury patients. The next thing to consider is your facilities model of nurse staffing. My facility will use a mix of acuity and ratio to schedule staff first based on patient acuity then based on ratio. Using a combination approach take individual patient needs and complexity into consideration as well as number of patient and staff knowledge and availability. The KC Rehabilitation unit is an acute care inpatient rehab unit with a 25 bed capacity. When operating at maximum patient capacity at total 28 primary staff are needed including the nurse manager. Primary unit staffing coverage of a 24 hours period will consist of twelve …show more content…
For me the simplest and possibly most important thing learned was staffing and scheduling are not the same. The two words are often use interchangeably, however have two very different meanings. The American Nurses Association (ANA’s) defines appropriate staffing as “a match of registered nurse expertise with the needs of the recipient of nursing care services in the context of the practice setting and situation. The provision of appropriate nurse staffing is necessary to reach safe, quality outcomes; it is achieved by dynamic, multifaceted decision making processes that must take into account a wide range of variables” (2014). Scheduling is the review of numbers and volume of patient’s projected based on census to determine the appropriated number of staff needed for an upcoming