A Quantitative Analysis of Nursing Activities in a Medical Ward

Quality of nursing care is defined as care that is provided according to job requirement and hospital standards. Adequate nurse staffing is essential to deliver quality patient care and improve nurses retention. In wards, nurses also perform indirect patient related activities where there is no direct contact with the patients. Amount of time nursing personnel spent on various activities is very important information for nurse administrators to calculate number of nursing personnel required. Non participatory observation method was used and a snapshot of nursing activities was recorded at 10 minutes interval from 7 am to 7 pm for 7 days consecutively. The results revealed that a total of 1714 activities were recorded and was classified as Basic care activities (4.61 %), complex care activities (62.60 %), administration (7.23 %), Education (1.23 %), Clerical (4.43 %), House Keeping (1.75 %), Maintenance (1.63 %), Off Station (0.23 %) and non productive activities (16.28 %). The proportion of complex care activities were more in the morning and continued throughout the day. The study concluded that more than half of the activities performed by nurses are complex care activities and all activities performed by nurses need to be considered for estimating staffing requirements.