Sunday, March 2, 2014

Death rate increases with the stress of carers - THE WORLD

recommend

article by e-mail
death rate increases with the stress of nurses

death risk in hospitals examined

div

The more sisters work with a university degree in a hospital, the better the patients are kept there: After the usual operations die there significantly fewer patients than in hospitals with less trained nurses. The reported a team of researchers who evaluated data from 300 hospitals in nine European countries in the journal “The Lancet”. The number of looked after by a single nurse patients affected according to the study, the mortality rate in the clinics. The researchers led by Linda Aiken had details of more than 420,000 patients evaluated, which were due to a surgical procedure in the hospital, about because of a knee or hip replacement, an appendectomy or vascular surgery. Mortality rates were generally low: You were on average between 1 and 1.5 percent in the countries studied. However, there were some extreme variations between individual hospitals in a country.

These countries were Austria, Belgium, England, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Germany was not among them because the researchers could get no information about the death rate in hospitals, reports the first author Linda Aiken of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia. The researchers linked the death rates with the training of nurses and their workload. They took into account the individual risk of death of patients, which is influenced by age, gender, type of intervention and disease. It also details a relative to the respective hospitals in their analyzes, for example, the technical equipment of the clinic. One result: With each patient, the nurse must care more, a patient’s risk of dying within 30 days of posting increases by seven percent. The mortality risk, however, is reduced by seven percent if the proportion of nurses with a university degree increased by ten percent. The results of the study are highly relevant for Germany, says Linda Aiken. An earlier study in 49 German hospitals have shown that no nurse possess a college degree. Germany was thus compared to other European and other developed countries, a real outlier. In addition, each nurse would come in Germany on more patients than in most other countries. This study was published in 2013 in the “International Journal of Nursing Studies.” “The data does not surprise us,” says Franz Wagner, Managing Director of the German professional association for nursing professions (DBfK). “We believe that there is a similar trend in Germany.” Here nurses are usually trained at vocational schools or nursing schools. There is not yet a purely academic education.

© Axel Springer SE 2014. All rights reserved

No comments:

Post a Comment