Research Critique, Part 1: Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality, Nurse Burnout, and Job Dissatisfaction
Grand Canyon University: NRS-433V
06-04-2016

PROBLEM STATEMENT:
The broad research problem leading to this study is the belief that nursing shortage in facilities leads to patient safety issues. The review of available literature on this topic shows strong evidence that lower nurse staffing levels in hospitals are associated with worse patient outcomes. Some of these outcomes include very high patient to nurse ratio, fatigue for nurses leading to costly medical mistakes, social environment, nursing staff attrition from the most affected facilities. The study specifically attempts to find a way to understand how nurse staffing levels has an impact on patient outcomes and nurse retention in hospital practice.

Purpose d Research Questions:
With one of the most critical steps being the determination of the problem that will be studied in the research process. (Nieswiadomy, 2008, p.45). Linda H. Aiken et al states the research question as 1. Determine the association between patient-to-nurse ratio and patient mortality 2. Determine the association between patient-to-nurse ratio and failure-to-rescue (deaths following complications) among surgical patients 3. Determine the association between patient-to-nurse ratio and nurse retention/attrition. 4. Determine the association between patient-to-nurse and the facts that contributed to the stress that lead to nurse burnout
The research questions clearly are focused towards addressing issues identified by the problem statement. The first question above seeks to understand how patient load (patient-to-nurse ratio) on nurses affects patient mortality. The second questions looks specifically at the impacts of patient load on surgical patient’s death following complications. The third