One fewer full-time equivalent RN per patient day increases the relative risk by 16 percent — a reasonably large increase, considering that in this study, adding five years to the patient’s age was associated with an absolute increase of 0.3 percent in in-hospital mortality.
While the nurse-staffing ratio has been linked to patient outcomes in other specialties, this is the first such study examining orthopedic surgery patients.
Read MedPage Today’s account of nurse-staffing ratios.
