Hospital Infections Increase When Nurses Are Spread Too Thin

November 01, 2012

Hospital Infections Increase When Nurses Are Spread Too Thin

It is no secret that hospital nurses have a stressful work environment, and one might expect nurses to feel the negative effects of a heavy workload, including burnout. To analyze this issue, a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing looked at the impact on patients when nurses are overworked.

Nurse Burnout Studied

More than 7,000 nurses employed at 161 Pennsylvania hospitals participated in the study. The researchers collected responses concerning issues like the nurses' feelings about personal accomplishment, their degree of emotional exhaustion and their sense of depersonalization. Summarizing the answers and rating them on a standard scale to measure burnout, the researchers found that over a third of the study participants had high levels of burnout related to their nursing jobs.

Coordinating these results with statistics on patient load, surgical site infections and urinary tract infections associated with catheter use, the researchers were able to demonstrate a relationship between nurse burnout and patient infection levels.

Higher Rates of Hospital-Acquired Infections Found

While the average daily patient load per nurse was 5.7, the occurrence of patient infections went up dramatically when the nurses' patient load was increased. Adding one extra patient to the daily workload meant 1,351 additional infections in the hospital population the nurses in the study cared for. Put another way, each additional patient a nurse was assigned led to about one added infection per 1,000 patients.

Further, each time the total number of nurses suffering from high-level burnout rose by 10 percent, the tally of infections also rose, with two more surgical site infections and one more urinary tract infection on average.

The researchers suggest that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between nurse burnout and higher rates of hospital-acquired infection. This is because exhausted, overworked nurses might be unable to pay enough attention to all their patients and might be less attentive to maintaining proper technique when handling and helping patients.

Hospital-acquired infections are no small matter. Patients can become very ill and even die, and the costs to treat the infection can skyrocket. Pennsylvania hospitals could prevent 4,160 infections every year, the researchers estimate, if they could bring the level of burned-out nurses down from three in 10 to only one in 10. This would result in a total cost savings of around $41 million and prevent patients from suffering further harm while being treated in the hospital.

Hospital administrators could improve patient outcomes and reduce the risk of medical malpractice by adequately staffing their hospitals. As the study suggests, patients can suffer needlessly from the failure to give nurses manageable workloads.

Anyone who has been injured by medical negligence or suffered harm from a hospital-acquired infection should consult with an experienced personal injury attorney. It may be possible to obtain monetary compensation covering medical costs and pain and suffering, along with compensation for lost wages due to the inability to work while recovering.

Article provided by Law Offices of Edward P. Shaughnessy
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