General Considerations
The American Nurses Association (ANA) has resources designed to help in addressing safe nurse staffing across healthcare settings and specialty areas.
- ANA Principles for Nurse Staffing - These Principles are designed to help determine appropriate staffing, assess the sufficiency of staffing, and review the comprehensiveness of staffing systems. These Principles are not specialty or setting specific. The panel that developed the Principles recognized that patient care needs are so complex and variable that relying on minimum staffing standards often does not reflect the reality of safe patient care.
The Principles were developed as a framework for evaluating the adequacy of nurse staffing and estimation of needs for a care setting.
The Principles fall into three major categories:
- The patient care unit (patient-specific and unit-specific factors)
- The nursing staff (experience and expertise)
- The organization (policies and practices)
Criteria for evaluation of sufficient staffing are also addressed.
A Utilization Guide for the ANA Principles for Nurse Staffing, which includes the Principles as well as guidance for how to apply them, is available online.
National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®)
NDNQI® is a database developed by ANA to enable healthcare institutions to collect data on nursing-sensitive indicators and compare their results to national comparative data. Find out more about the subscription service.
In addition, The Joint Commission has staffing effectiveness standards for various settings.