In the world of infusion centers, patient acuity/intensity scoring has become the perceived go-to intervention to “fix” nurse satisfaction problems.
Infusion center leaders have historically struggled to quantify how much direct nursing care is needed for each day, objectively determine how many nurses are needed on a given day to care for the planned (and unplanned) patients that will arrive at the unit, and communicate the complexity of the patients they care for to justify additional team members. They are also trying to decrease stress and increase fairness by evening out the patient load for each individual nurse. The typical metrics of volumes or total hours of scheduled chair time are the most available data, and the most often used.
But nurses do not feel this tells the entire story. Nursing satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted issue that a single intervention, based on a single imperfect metric, is unlikely to solve.
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