Increasing nurse staffing hours can help cut down on flu- and pneumonia-related hospitalizations, according to a new study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
Led by researchers at Brown University’s School of Public Health, a team examined three years of Medicare claims for nearly 3 million long-term and short-stay residents. The investigators calculated study subjects’ risk of developing pneumonia or influenza that led to hospitalization, looking for facility characteristics that drove the risk down.
“Hiring more registered nurses and licensed independent practitioners (such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants), increasing staffing hours, and higher quality care practices may be modifiable means of reducing” the prevalence of those infections in long-term care facilities, the researchers reported.
Looking at short-stay patients, 52.6% of the facilities had one or more hospitalizations for pneumonia or influenza, while that chance of hospitalization jumped to 87.6% in long-stay populations. Homes with lower risk had more licensed independent practitioners, higher registered nurse hours per resident per day, and fewer antipsychotic prescriptions.
