Combatting Nurse Burnout Through Improved Nurse Patient Ratios

Publication Date

Spring 3-29-2025

Presentation Length

Poster/Gallery presentation

College

Gordon E. Inman College of Nursing

Department

Nursing, School of

Student Level

Undergraduate

SPARK Category

Research

Faculty Advisor

Linda Wofford

SPARK Session

Independent Presentation

Presentation Type

Poster

Summary

Nurse burnout is an issue that affects all hospital systems in the US. It is due to a variety of factors including high stress work environment, staffing shortages, lack of sleep, lack of support, emotional strain, and more. When over half of the workers in a career are experiencing burnout, you know a change needs to take place. In many facilities, there are no practices in place to prevent this from occurring. Currently, a large contributing factor is high nurse to patient ratios. At Centennial Medical Center on floor 7T, ratios can get as high as 1:7. The plan that we are recommending is hospital implemented strict 1:4 patient ratios. The timeline for implementation would most likely look like training and education taking about 2 months to train managers and charge nurses on recognizing burnout, such as calling out and no call/no shows and nurses on being preceptors for new nurses. Then, policy enforcement would take another month to complete. In terms of cost, the most prevalent cost would be hiring more nurses, as we cannot cut down ratios unless we have the staffing to allow us to do so. Hiring/replacing nurses can cost anywhere between $37,500- $58,400 and the amount of new hires depends on current staffing numbers of the floor. The expected outcome for our change proposal is to have the set nurse-patient ratio of 1-3, max 4, be set and implemented into medical-surgical units at Centennial Medical Center. Thus, preventing burnout from experiencing high patient-nurse ratios, further preventing the actions of calling out and high turnover rates. The plan for sustaining this change is by implementing a regular policy review to continue to evaluate and update improvements to nurse-to-patient ratio policies based on the reviews of the nurses. Also continuing to monitor data through turnover rates, patient outcomes/satisfaction and nurses' well-being surveys will allow staff to track the outcomes of these policies and allow staff to optimize and refine their strategies. The future implications of this project would hopefully reduce nurse turnover. By implementing better working conditions hospitals could track the statistics of nurse turnover rates which will subsequently benefit the hospitals by reducing the cost of hiring and training new staff. Nurses would hopefully notice an improved workplace culture which can contribute to decreased turnover, improved job satisfaction, and promote teamwork which would ultimately benefit the patient.

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