Dive Brief:
- A new study reviewed patient-nurse interaction patterns to see if they could minimize interactions with patients at the highest risk.
- Computer modeling of these interactions suggested that hospitals could lower infections by taking three steps -- hiring more nurses, creating a strategy to minimize social spreading of infections, and limiting patient contact to only when medically necessary.
- These research results sync up well with other research from Health Affairs, which found that increasing nurse staffing by three nurse hours per day lowered hospital readmissions.
Dive Insight:
It stands to reason that when one nurse makes contact with multiple patients, they're more likely to spread infections from patient to patient. And it's good for continuity of care to have patients seen by a single nurse per shift. But the reality is, creating a social model from scratch which minimizes social contact among nurses is likely to cause major disruptions in workflow. Limiting some types of nurse-patient and nurse-nurse interaction may indeed be a good idea, but it's going to be difficult to pull off and quite possibly, painful for all involved.