WFRC USRG Lunch: Nurse staffing, skill mix and quality in acute and primary care Event

Please join the Work Futures Research Centre in welcoming Professor Peter Griffiths for a seminar including a networking lunch:

"Nurse staffing, skill mix and quality in acute and primary care: What can (still) be learned from routine administrative data?" (or) "Does having more Registered Nurses deliver better outcomes? ….and don’t we know that already?"

Visitors to the “Nursing Times" website in May might have seen readers’ reactions to preliminary reports of the latest study reporting an association between nurse staffing and quality of care. The headline “Higher nurse ratio improves care, finds major study” lead to howls of derision from readers – results were seen as restating the obvious, the research a waste of money and the researchers labelled idiots. But have we really seen it all before and is there nothing new to be learned about the associations between nurse staffing and patient outcomes?

In this seminar I will give an overview of the main research in the field, focussing on the highly influential work that has relied on routinely collected administrative data and explore new and future directions including the opportunities raised by the RN4CAST study that attracted so much derision and recent work looking at associations between nurse staffing and quality in primary care. I will attempt to address the question “How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?” and consider whether asking “How many nurses do we need?” is any more worthy a question.

Seminar at 11:30am, lunch and networking from 12:30pm.