Nurse Staffing Calculation in the Emergency Department - Performance-Oriented Calculation Based on the Manchester Triage System at the University Hospital Bonn

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 11; no. 5; p. e0154344
• Main Authors: Gräff, Ingo, Goldschmidt, Bernd, Glien, Procula, Klockner, Sophia, Erdfelder, Felix, Schiefer, Jennifer Lynn, Grigutsch, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 03.05.2016; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Anesthesiology; Confidence intervals; Consent; Data collection; Emergencies; Emergency medical care; Emergency medical services; Emergency Service, Hospital; Emergency services; Engineering and Technology; Ethics; Germany; Hospital emergency services; Hospitals, University; Humans; Management; Mathematical analysis; Medicine and Health Sciences; Nurses; Nurses - supply & distribution; Nursing; Nursing care; Observational studies; Patients; People and Places; Personnel Staffing and Scheduling - statistics & numerical data; Physical Sciences; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences; Triage; Variation; Variations; Workforce; Workforce planning; Working conditions; Working hours; Workload; Germany
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154344

To date, there are no valid statistics regarding the number of full time staff necessary for nursing care in emergency departments in Europe. Staff requirement calculations were performed using state-of-the art procedures which take both fluctuating patient volume and individual staff shortfall rates into consideration. In a longitudinal observational study, the average nursing staff engagement time per patient was assessed for 503 patients. For this purpose, a full-time staffing calculation was estimated based on the five priority levels of the Manchester Triage System (MTS), taking into account specific workload fluctuations (50th-95th percentiles). Patients classified to the MTS category red (n = 35) required the most engagement time with an average of 97.93 min per patient. On weighted average, for orange MTS category patients (n = 118), nursing staff were required for 85.07 min, for patients in the yellow MTS category (n = 181), 40.95 min, while the two MTS categories with the least acute patients, green (n = 129) and blue (n = 40) required 23.18 min and 14.99 min engagement time per patient, respectively. Individual staff shortfall due to sick days and vacation time was 20.87% of the total working hours. When extrapolating this to 21,899 (2010) emergency patients, 67-123 emergency patients (50-95% percentile) per month can be seen by one nurse. The calculated full time staffing requirement depending on the percentiles was 14.8 to 27.1. Performance-oriented staff planning offers an objective instrument for calculation of the full-time nursing staff required in emergency departments.