Earlier this year, the Department of Health published a document entitled a Framework for Safe Nurse Staffing and Skill Mix in General and Specialist Medical and Surgical Care Settings in Adult Hospitals in Ireland. In this report the Department made a number of recommendations to ensure that the staffing of hospital wards was safe and effective; that is to ensure the right number of nurses are in the right place at the right time and with the right skills to deliver nursing care. The overall goal of this project is to measure the extent to which the recommendations outlined in the Framework report are impacting on patients and staff. The project will also examine how much the recommendations will cost to implement. To do this we will measure a number of outcomes that we know from previous research are related to nurse staffing. These will include outcomes such as missed care, that is looking at work that nurses may not have had time to complete as well as on how satisfied patients are with their care both before and after the recommendations have been put in place. If we find that the recommendations are having a positive outcome for both patients and staff, the initiatives in the report will be implemented across the health services in Ireland.
