INTENSIVE CARE UNIT NURSE’S WORKLOAD AND QUANTITATIVE DETERMINATION OF PATIENT CARE CLASSES

Introduction. Nurses’ contribution is an important determinant of clinical recovery outcome. Health care quality improvement requires instruments for adequate evaluation of patients’ clinical conditions and corresponding estimated health care.
Therapeutic intervention scoring system provides evaluation of nurse’s workload, estimation of patient related activity relative to the total working time, clinical condition severity etc. Evaluation of workload and required intervention amount attempts to forecast scope of necessary time and competence resources required for improvement of patient safety and care quality
improvement, providing basis for adequate health care personnel allocation in hospitals. The aim is estimation of intensive care unit nurse’s workload and quantitative determination of patient care classes.
Study methods: quantitative (TISS-76 scale). Research participants - nurses of intensive care units (n=539). Results of the study showed that increasing proportion of therapeutic intervention measured by TISS score, implies direct correlation between clinical condition severity and amount of therapeutic interventions.
Results. Using the TISS-76 scale, certain classes of patient care were defined. The highest number of patients in care class III was 297 or 55%, for whom the average number of manipulations during the day was 25. The number of patients in care class II was 235 or 44%. The lowest number of patients in care class IV was 7 or 1%. The nursing/patient ratio during the study was on average 1: 2.8 - almost three times higher than the recommended norm for patients with care classes IV and III. There was a considerable variety of care activities and a variety of manipulations in the intensive care unit's nurses. The average
maximum number of TISS points was 2 times higher than the average minimum number of TISS points.