A study led by the University of Greenwich shows that patients in intensive care units (ICUs) have a better chance of survival if there are more doctors and nurses working on the unit.
It also highlights that survival of the most severely ill patients is most affected when there are insufficient nurses.
For the first time, researchers have been able to separate out staffing levels from other factors, such as workload and how ill patients are, after examining nearly 40,000 patient records and data from 65 ICUs in the UK.
This is the first study of patient survival in ICUs to look at the numbers of doctors as well as nurses. Professor Elizabeth West, who led the research, said that doctors and nurses work closely together and function as a team on ICUs more than on other wards: “Future studies need to see the whole picture and examine how the multi-disciplinary team works together.” It is also the first study to show that there is a sub-group of patients – those who are the most severely ill – who are most affected by low levels of nurse staffing.
