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| RN4CAST... The Registered Nurse Consortium |
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The ambition of the RN4CAST project is to produce actionable recommendations to improve nursing care and patient outcomes at the individual hospital level and to inform national policies that could improve care outcomes by strategic investments in nursing.
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NEW & NOTEWORTHY
What follows is an Associated Press Release to summarize the recent survey findings of the RN4CAST Consortium, and published March 20, 2012 in the British Medical Journal.
(PHILADELPHIA, PA -- March 21, 2012) In one of the largest studies of its kind, a consortium of investigators from 13 countries led by the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the U.S. and the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in Europe, found that nurses who reported better working conditions in hospitals and less likelihood of leaving also had patients who were more satisfied with their hospital stay and rated their hospitals more highly. The study was released March 20, 2012 in the current issue of the prestigious British Medical Journal.
"Patient safety, satisfaction, and quality of hospital care: cross sectional surveys of nurses and patients in 12 countries in Europe and the United States" by Dr. Linda H. Aiken and the RN4Cast Corsortium. British Medical Journal 2012;344:e1717
The massive study, which in some countries involved every hospital, surveyed 61,168 bedside nurses and 131,318 patients in more than 1,000 hospitals in 13 countries over the course of three years, finding that in those hospitals with better work environments and fewer patients in each nurse’s workload, patients and nurses both reported higher standards of care and more satisfied patients.
“Patients in European and U.S. hospitals with better work environments were more likely to rate their hospital highly and to recommend their hospital” to others, wrote the study’s lead author, Linda H. Aiken, PhD, RN, a professor of nursing and sociology and director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
Patient safety is also a concern in hospitals that have poor work environments and insufficient nurse staffing, said Walter Sermeus, professor at Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, leader of the European consortium.
Nurses in Poland and Greece were three times more likely to give their hospitals a failing grade for safety than nurses in the U.S. and Norway. The majority of nurses in every country expressed a lack of confidence that hospital management would resolve problems in patient care.
Policy implications for the findings suggest that despite the differences among the healthcare systems studied, particularly in terms of both organization and financing, all countries encountered problems of “hospital quality, safety, and nurse burnout and dissatisfaction.” Many European nurses report they intend to leave their hospital positions, from 19 percent in The Netherlands to nearly half of all nurses (49 percent) in Finland and Greece, leading the researchers to ponder the potential for a worsening shortage of nurses.
A significantly lower proportion of nurses in the U.S. (14 percent) reported their intentions to leave their current positions, possibly due to increased efforts in the U.S. to improve hospital nurse staffing levels. Having fewer patients per nurse has been linked to better outcomes for patients, including lower rates of death following everyday surgeries. Nearly 7 percent or 400 in the hospitals in the U.S. have achieved “magnet status,” so-called due to their ability to attract and retain nurses because of good work environments. No hospital in Europe has a similar “magnet” designation.
The study, conducted with a 3 million euro grant from the European Commission with additional funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., investigated hospital quality and safety of care in Belgium, England, Finland, Ireland, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S. |
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| CHOPR is the U.S.A. Partner of the RN4Cast Consortium |
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| The Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research is the US Partner of the RN4Cast Consortium. We play a central role in this consortium, because of our unique expertise in the domain of nurse staffing and patient outcome research and the experience in conducting international research in 16 countries. The faculty and staff of CHOPR are recognized as world leaders in this domain, as has been shown by many national and international awards given for significant and lasting contributions to research and policy. The EU-US collaboration allows the consortium to build on existing knowledge and to expand it to nursing workforce planning in a broad European perspective. |
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This three-year project, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, started at the beginning of 2009. The project is coordinated by the Center for Health Services and Nursing Research, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium with the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania serving as vice-coordinator. |
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| This study investigates the role that the nursing work environment and nursing staff deployment play in nurse recruitment, retention, productivity and patient outcomes. The consortium consists of a total of 16 countries.... that's 12 European countries (Belgium, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the UK), the USA and three International Cooperating Partner Countries (ICPC) of the European Union (Botswana, China, and South Africa), making it the largest consortium ever in this domain. Research teams of the European countries will study at least 30 hospitals each, for an overall minimum of 330 hospitals and 15,000 nurses and data from tens of thousands of patients |
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SEPTEMBER 2012 RN4CAST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE June 8, 2011 - The Institute of Nursing Science of the University of Basel is pleased to announce an RN4CAST International Conference, " Nursing workforce and quality of care in European hospitals" on 14 September 2012 at the Zentrum für Lehre und Forschung (ZLF), University Hospital Basel, Switzerland. Read more about the conference by selecting the following link to International Conference Program. |
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| RN4CAST TIME LINE - SEPTEMBER 2009 - PRESENT
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| September 2009: First official RN4CAST Consortium Meeting. Investigators from 15 participating countries met with officials from the European Commission at the Commission's headquarters in Brussels. Stakeholders from international organizations also attended. Link to Dr. Aiken's presentation. |
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January 14-15, 2010: RN4CAST Meeting in Leuven, Belgium. Third official meeting of the RN4Cast Consortium.
January 2010: Norway was accepted into the study |
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| May 5-8, 2011: RN4CAST International Council of Nurses (ICN) Conference in Valetta-Malta. Presented strong evidence demonstrating how nurses, as key members of the health services team, promote and contribute to quality and accessible health care. The conference also provided opportunities to disseminate nursing knowledge and leadership across specialities, cultures and countries. |
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| June 1-2, 2011: "Human Resources Management for Nursing in Europe", RN4CAST Consortium Meeting in Krakow, Poland. The purpose of the RN4CAST programme was to expand typical forecasting models with reference to the features of work environments, qualifications of the nurse workforce and the impact of these on nurse retention, productivity and patient outcomes. Krakow is viewed as the religious capital of Poland and therefore the one hundredth anniversary of nursing in Poland was also celebrated by a Holy Mass in the St Anna University Collegiate Church. Link to: Dr. Linda Aiken's presentation. |
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| RN4CAST Links
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| RN4CAST Publications
Van den Heede, K., Sermeus, W., Diya L., Clarke, S.P., Lesaffre, E., Vleugels, A., and Aiken, L.H. 2009. Nurse staffing and patient outcomes in Belgian acute hospitals: cross sectional analysus of administrative data. Intl. J. Nurs. Stud. 46: 928-939. |
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