The nursing organization, access to training and motivation are key to safety in hospitals.

The next day May 21 will be held in Madrid, at the Carlos III Health Institute, the symposium "Nurse staffing and its Impact on Patient Safety: towards a Better forecast of human resources in nursing needs", organized by Investen. During this event will be the study RN4CAST that although referred to hospitals, is worth seeing
for the uniqueness of your starting point: studies of Linda Aiken.

In 2002 and 2003, Aiken released his studies (see links at the bottom) on the so-called "magnetic hospitals,"those who attract the best medical and nursing professionals. They showed that nursing human resources influence the quality of the results of these hospitals, in aspects such as mortality or neglect of patient calls, in addition to its own welfare of nurses. Since then the concern for proper management of nursing resources and the design of planning models needs of these resources has been increasing. It should be noted that the results of Aiken were adjusted for other resources, such as doctor / beds or others.

In this sense, the project is underway Forecasting Registered Nurse (RN4CAST) that aims to collect data from 15,000 nurses and 10,000 patients in 330 hospitals in 11 countries participating in the study. Data are being collected from the environment and human resource nurses through the hospital and the nurses themselves.

These data will be associated with patient outcomes, which will be drawn from the records afterthe high standard of patients.

Data collection will take place in acute general hospitals and in them the majority of working nurses are responsible for the greatest number of medical errors and the biggest share of health spending.

The project is coordinated by the Center for Health Services and Nursing Research of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, together with the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) as vice-coordinator.

Participating countries are Belgium, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,Netherlands, UK, U.S. and three international cooperation partners (Botswana, China, and South Africa).

In Spain, the project is coordinated by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, through INVESTEN.

With the results of the project will support the creation of standards for human resource planning in nursing.

It would be interesting that studies be undertaken similar to this one focusing on the area of primary care,which allow us to explore in an objective manner, what is the influence of staffing ratios on patient safety.


Aiken, LH, Clarke SP, Sloane DM, (2002) Hospital staffing, organization, and quality of care: cross-national Findings Nurs. Outlook, 50.187-194
Aiken, LH, Clarke SP, Cheung RB, Sloane, DM, Silber JH (2003) Educational Levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. JAMA, 290.1617-1623


Posted by Juan José Jurado
English version by Jesús Moreno