399 Building the Case for Improved Nurse Staffing

Abstract Introduction Our burn center is an ABA verified burn center that utilizes a ‘hybrid’ model to care for its patients. The center resides across mixed medical/ surgical trauma units within a large university hospital. This can present many challenges to meet the needs to adequately care for patients with the budgeted nursing resources. Nursing leadership recognized the need to adjust the Registered Nurse (RN) to patient ratio on the adult medical-surgical unit that cares for the burn population. With the budget proposal developed by nursing leadership with collaboration from unit nurses, there was an opportunity to improve upon our current RN staffing model. The purpose of this proposal was to garner additional RN staffing within a mixed medical/surgical trauma and burn unit utilizing historical data Methods Nursing leadership sought out qualitative information from staff nurses during shared governance and staff meeting forums. With this information, a deeper dive was done into objective and measurable data to quantify the growth of the burn center. Staff satisfaction, patient experience, and financial data were also reviewed from a historical perspective. A survey was conducted by the organization for all nursing units to respond through a third party vendor. The survey included a 5-point Likert Scale to assess perception of the question “my unit is adequately staffed” along with 70 other questions of engagement. 89% of staff strongly disagree, this result showed a significant variance from the remainder of the organization as well as nationally when compared to like units. Patient experience and financial metrics for this unit also demonstrated significant opportunities for improvement. This 30 bed unit runs 6 RNs for day and evening shift and 5 for night shift. A proposal was put forth that utilized the compiled historical burn center data including: burn patient days, burn patient length of stay, and dressing hours as well as other fiscal and patient experience metrics, with the goal being to gain additional nursing resources. These resources would be utilized to decrease the RN to patient ratios. Results The proposal for additional budgeted RN staff was accepted. With the increase in Full-Time Equivalent (FTEs) dollars, nursing leadership has engaged the assistance of staff RNs for planning, implementation, and utilization of additional nursing resources. Applicability of Research to Practice By utilizing the historical data as well as survey