The effects of workloads of nurses whom work in surgical clinics on patient safety

The availability of producing high quality health care service depende on the usage of high quality patient care and patient safety. To continously sustain high quality and safe patient care, a more efficient nurse employment strategy must be followed and work amount per nurse needs to be reduced. The goal of this research is to examine the effects of workloads of Nurses whom work in surgical clinics on patient safety. The research is descriptive and has been conducted with 107 Nurses whom work in Baskent University Ankara Hospital Surgical Clinics Intensive Care and Surgical Services between the dates 22.08.2013-30.01.2014 During the research; Nurses' descriptive properties, workload, form focusing on experience with patient safety and opinion definition forms, Workload scale, Chenteleman Patient Classification Scale, Workload monitoring forms / Nursing Application List has been used The majority of the experiment was conducted with women with %36.4 are between the ages of 23 and 25, %59.8 percent were university graduates, %68.2 worked in service and %11.2 worked as head nurses. %43.9 had work experience less than 2 years. According to the nurses the leading cause related to patient safety is "the incapability of nurses, lack of experience and lact of focus, and around half of the nurses suggested "increased number of nurses employed." %43 of the nurses commented that the workload is above acceptable and %30.8 commented that the worload was much above acceptable. %45.8 said the leading cause of the workload increase is due to littleness of nurse employment. The effects of nurse workload on patient safety are listed as decrease in time spent per patient, lack of cautiousness due to too much work and the increased risk of error due to fathigue and loss of concentration. The average workload point of headnurses were less compared to the nurses(p<0.05). As the number of daily surgical appereances increase, the workload point average has been seen to increase. By using these results the error reasons stated by the nurses and their resolution suggestions, increased regulatory activities focused on reducing nurse workload, number of patients per nurse distribution to be more balanced, paying more attention on care requirements, and planning of patient to nurse ratio can be adviced.