Nurses staff allocation related to patient care and other i?nterventions i?n the wards

NURSES STAFF ALLOCATİON RELATED TO PATİENT CARE AND OTHER INTERVENTİONS İN THE WARDSNurse manpower is one of the most important sources of delivery health care services. Effective and efficient use of staff nurses in hospitals, ensuring delivery of quality nursing services and better management are known to be a direct impact on hospitals productivity. Nurses use of their working hours has been a subject to discussion over the past years both in our country and internationally. The aim of the study to investigate allocation of nursing time, the amount of time nurses spend on direct nursing care and organization of direct nursing care activities.A work sampling study was conducted over a seven days period for each of the 9 (day) and 15 (night) hours work shifts, on a randomly selected observe. Nursing activities were observed for different 30 minutes (lasting) time blocks, which were chosen from random numbers table, and recorded on the work sampling data collection forms. Observations were totaled and percent occurrence of each nursing activity was calculated for each service, by shift and day within a given service, and finally averaged for all three services.Total number of the nursing activities, observed in this study is 6508. Total percentage of nursing time spend for direct nursing care was 53.5%, 10.3% on indirect nursing care, 15% ward duties and 21.2% personal time of nurses allocation on day shifts. Total percentage of nursing time spend for direct nursing care was 56.4%, %10.3% on indirect nursing care, 10.4% ward duties and 22.9% personal time of nurses allocation on night shifts.The finding of the study indicated that nurses allocated a large proportions of the direct nursing care activities for medications and taking vital signs.