The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives

by Theresa Brown

The fewer the number of nurses the lower the labor costs for the hospital. But if I give care a numerical value, represented by TLC, while P stands for number of patients and RN for each individual nurse, then: RN/p = TLC The more patients an individual nurse cares for, the smaller the amount of TLC per patient. More significantly, research on staffing levels has made it pretty clear that the more patients a nurse has above a certain number (the number itself depends on the patient population and how sick the patients are), the larger the likelihood a patient will die who wouldn’t have otherwise. In other words, nurse-to-patient ratios aren’t just about patients feeling cared for; they’re also about fragile people staying alive.