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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1448871
This article is part of the Research Topic Hospital Management and Healthcare Policy: Financing, Resourcing and Accessibility, Volume II View all 9 articles

Relevant factors affecting nurse staffing: a qualitative study from the perspective of nursing managers

Provisionally accepted
Gege Li Gege Li 1,2Waner WANG Waner WANG 3Tiemei Shen Tiemei Shen 2Jiangfeng Pu Jiangfeng Pu 3Zhanghao Xie Zhanghao Xie 4Yixuan Xu Yixuan Xu 4Huigen Huang Huigen Huang 1,2,5*
  • 1 School of Nursing, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
  • 2 Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
  • 3 School of Nursing, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou, China
  • 4 College of Medicine, Shantou University, Shantou, Guangdong Province, China
  • 5 Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Objective: To understand the current situation of nursing manpower allocation, explore the factors affecting nurse staffing, improve nurse staffing level, and provide reference for better formulation of nursing human resources staffing standards.Methods: A descriptive research method was used to conduct semi-structured interviews with 14 nursing managers. The data were analyzed and refined by content analysis. The sample size was subject to content saturation.Results: This study identified four themes and twelve sub-themes of influencing nurse staffing factors. The themes extracted include: hospital level (imperfect policies and systems, insufficient manpower reserve), department level (department characteristics, cost-effectiveness driven nurse staffing, cultural construction of the department, multi-level recognition and support), patient level (patient demographic, patient satisfaction), nurse level (nurse shortage, nurse overload, nurse skillmix, personal career development).Hospital and department managers need to comprehensively consider the factors of affecting nurse staffing. Adopting multidimensional optimization measures, improving relevant systems, optimizing nurse structure, and establishing flexible and mobile nurse database to cope with public emergencies, so as to effectively improve nurse staffing and nursing service quality.

    Keywords: Nurse staffing1, Nurse manager2, Semi-structured interviews3, Influencing factor4, human resources5

    Received: 14 Jun 2024; Accepted: 30 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Li, WANG, Shen, Pu, Xie, Xu and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Huigen Huang, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, Guangzhou, 510317, Guangdong Province, China

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