Use of Different Nurses in Hospitals – Costs, Wages, Care Intensity

Introduction

The subject matter of the article is clearly stated by the heading itself. The article is entitled “Hospital Nursing Workforce Costs, Wages, Occupational Mix, and Resource Utilization.” The main objective of this article is to increase the understanding of how different types of RNs, LPNs as well as nurse aides are used in hospitals in nonprofit, proprietary as well as government – owned hospitals with the aim of estimating the costs, wages together with the intensity of nursing care with the help of the national data set. To achieve this, the researchers employ a cross – sectional observational study of some 3,129 hospitals in all states making use of the 2008 data from the Occupational Mix Survey that was administered by the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) (Welton, 2011). Combining the nursing skill mix, labor costs, and hours with the other CMS hospital descriptive data helps a great deal in this research. The method used is very good and efficient since it makes sure that the whole country is covered.

The results show that the RN labor costs make up a quarter of the hospital expenditures whereas the cost of labor is close to a quarter trillion dollars annually. The study compares the statistics of the proprietary hospitals, urban hospitals, government hospitals and nonprofit hospitals. It is revealed that on average, proprietary hospitals have some 1.3 RNs per bed alongside 1.9 nursing personnel per bed. On the other hand, urban hospitals have 1.7 RNs per bed and 2.3 nursing personnel per bed (Welton, 2011). Evidently, the study is in-depth and the figures provided are very accurate. These findings can be very helpful in the comparison of nursing care across the different types of hospitals in the country.