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Western Journal of Nursing Research
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Can State Databases Be Used to Develop a National, Standardized Hospital Nurse Staffing Database?

Lynn Unruh

University of Central Florida, Lunruh{at}mail.ucf.edu

C. Allison Russo

Thomson Healthcare

H. Joanna Jiang

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Carol Stocks

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

This study evaluates the feasibility of building a national, standardized hospital nurse staffing database from state data collections in order to improve the availability of valid, reliable nursing staffing measures and to allow linkage to other databases. A state-by-state review of public and private reporting systems reveals that 25 states collect some form of nurse staffing data. Out of those, 12 states make complete, usable data available, and 5 additionally meet data quality and specificity criteria. Our review finds that there is little consistency in the content of the RN measure, which makes it difficult to conduct multistate research on nurse staffing topics. We recommend the long-term development of two types of nurse staffing databases: a state-by-state collection, and a standardized, multistate database with uniform data elements across states. This mixed approach will provide a comprehensive source of nurse staffing data to researchers with diverse analytic needs.

Key Words: Descriptive quantitative methods • nurse staffing measures • data availability

This version was published on February 1, 2009

Western Journal of Nursing Research, Vol. 31, No. 1, 66-88 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0193945908319992
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