Intrahospital transfers and the impact on nursing workload

Nicole Blay, Michael A Roche, Christine Duffield and Robyn Gallagher

Journal of Clinical Nursing, 2017, vol. 26, issue 23-24, 4822-4829

Abstract: Aims and objectives To determine the rate of patient moves and the impact on nurses’ time. Background Bed shortages and strategies designed to increase patient flow have led to a global increase in patient transfers between wards. The impact of transferring patients between wards and between beds within a ward on nurses’ workload has not previously been measured. Design A two‐stage sequential study. Retrospective analysis of hospital data and a prospective observational‐timing study. Methods Secondary analysis of an administrative data set to inform the rate of ward and bed transfers (n = 34,715) was undertaken followed by an observational‐timing study of nurses’ activities associated with patient transfers (n = 75). Results Over 10,000 patients were moved 34,715 times in 1 year which equates to an average of 2.4 transfers per patient. On average, patient transfers took 42 min and bed transfers took 11 min of nurses’ time. Based on the frequency of patient moves, 11.3 full‐time equivalent nurses are needed to move patients within the site hospital each month. Conclusion Transferring patients is workload intensive on nurses’ time and should be included in nursing workload measurement systems. Relevance to clinical practice Nurses at the site hospital spend over 1700 hr each month on activities associated with transferring patients, meaning that less time is available for nursing care.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.13838

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:jocnur:v:26:y:2017:i:23-24:p:4822-4829

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Clinical Nursing from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().