With a growing shortage of nurses worldwide, changes have been introduced across countries to nurse staffing to better match nursing staff numbers and skill mix to patient needs. Nurse staffing has been linked to a range of patient and non-patient outcomes including patient mortality, injury, falls, infections, complications, and pressure ulcers; costs, and nursing staff turnover. A recent Cochrane systematic review identified the limited evidence available from studies on the impact of hospital nurse staffing interventions due partially to the diversity of outcomes used across studies and measures used for individual outcomes. The review recommended the development of core outcomes for studies of hospital nurse staffing. This proposal is to conduct a three-round online Delphi study with nursing stakeholders internationally.
ContributorsProf. Michelle Butler, Faculty of Science and Health, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland (PI)
Dr. Tim Schultz, School of Nursing, University of Adelaide, Adelaide South Australia, Australia
Dr. Phil Halligan, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems, University College Dublin, Dublin , Ireland
Prof. Leigh Kinsman, School of Nursing, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
Prof. Jonathan Drennan, School of Nursing, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Disease Category: Effective practice/health systems
Disease Name:
Age Range: 0 - 120
Sex: Either
Nature of Intervention: Other
- Conference participants
- Consumers (caregivers)
- Consumers (patients)
- Governmental agencies
- Policy makers
- Regulatory agency representatives
- Researchers
- Service commissioners
- Service providers
- Service users
- COS for clinical trials or clinical research
- Consensus meeting
- Delphi process
- Literature review
Modified Delphi study to obtain consensus amongst nursing and health policy stakeholders internationally.
1. Thematic analysis of studies of nurse staffing to prepare initial set of outcomes.
2. Three-round online survey will be used to achieve as wide a sample as possible globally. Nursing stakeholders will include clinical nurses, nursing leaders, nurse educators, health policy makers, other healthcare professionals, international thought leaders (e.g., WHO, ICN) and patient representatives. The survey will be administered in several languages.
3. Series of workshops to refine standard measures and prepare guidance material.