Low Nurse Staffing Increases Mortality of Hip-Fracture Patients

A study presented at the AAOS annual meeting found Medicare patients with a hip fracture are more likely to die when admitted to hospitals with lower nurse-staffing levels, according to a report by MedPage Today.

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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.

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