Nurse to Patient Ratio

Nurse to Patient Ratio

Background of the Issue

Nursing is a very tough and organized professional these days. Nurses require understanding of how to deal with the patient in tough times. It also requires proper training to understand how they can manage all the issues keeping in view all other people surrounding Nurses like Doctors, Patient's parent, Hospital administration. They must know how to deal with these issues. Patients require acute care provided by the Nurses; hence there must be a reasonable balance in Nurse to Patient Ratio, which ensures effective provision of services. However, in the recent past, a Nurse has to look after so many patients, which reduces the effectiveness of the service provided by the Nurses (Feldman, 2003).

Nurse to Patient ratio represents the number of nurses that are present to every patient in a country or region. An article published in the April 2010 issue of HSR examines the effects of legislation passed in California limiting the number of patients per nurse and the mortality occurring in surgical services. The law was passed in 2004, and United States was the first to limit the number of patients per nurse. For instance, five patients are allotted to each nurse in use of surgery or medicine, four pediatrics to each person, nurses are provided to one patient in the intensive care, six were assigned the psychiatric care as their principle and three nurses per patient were assigned in the pregnancy. The ratio between patient and nurses show a better trend in various countries now, and this implies that a good medical care is being guaranteed (Young, 2009).

This issue is critical and holds great importance because it has been found that a higher Nursing to Patient Ratio affects the service of health care and has resulted to severe ...