Les modèles de dotation en soins infirmiers dans un contexte de soins aigus
The Quebec health care system faces great challenges when it comes to nurse staffing. Having to provide for a growing demand in services while dealing with a decreasing qualified labor force generates a lower quality and less secure standard of care. This creates extensive costs for health organizations. Staffing is considered a corner stone of human resources management but there is no clear and established practice that ensures optimal, realistic and efficient nurse staffing. Many studies have examined staffing from only a single perspective which has resulted in the overlooking of other important staffing considerations and a narrow vision of nurse staffing. The aim of this study was to identify the staffing models used in hospital acute care units in one of the biggest regions in Quebec while concurrently considering the three dimensions of nurse staffing: resource levels, staff mix and team stability. According to a descriptive quantitative design, the necessary variables for staffing operationalization were collected directly from the human resources departments of the four hospital centers for a total of 40 units of care which were studied for the target period between Janurary 11, 2016 and March 7, 2016. Staffing models were identified with a multiple factorial analysis and a hierarchical ascendant classification, used to generate a limited number of nurse staffing models. based on the configurational approach. This study’s results are a description of nurse staffing characteristics in the short-term hospitalization care units. Four different nurse staffing models emerged from the studied hospital centers: the least resourced model, the moderately resourced basic model, the moderately resourced professional model and the most resourced model. This representation of staffing models introduces new data for nursing workforce planning. The results provide human resources managers with data to compare to their staffing model or to other identified models and to other care units associated models in the studied sample. Moreover, because this study leads to a picture of the actual staffing situation it provides valuable information to optimize nurse staffing planning. Prior to this study, there were to our knowledge no staffing model classifications that considered all staffing dimensions simultaneously.
Administration Staffing Nursing Acute care Models Management