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Nurses matter: more evidence
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  • Published on: 24 April 2020
    Response to Aiken and Sloan
    • Jack Needleman, Professor Department of Health Policy and Management, Fielding School of Public Health, University of California Los Angeles
    • Other Contributors:
      • Patricia W. Stone, Professor

    To the editor,

    In their editorial commenting on our paper “Association of registered nurse and nursing support staffing with inpatient hospital mortality,” [1] Aiken and Sloane misrepresent our study results, conclusions and implications. They characterize our study as examining the impact of substitution of nursing support staff for professional nurses or registered nurses (RNs) (commonly described as skill mix). This is done despite acknowledging that we stated our findings should not be interpreted to mean that nursing aides can safely substitute for RNs. Furthermore, as Aiken and Sloane acknowledge each of us have published multiple studies [2 3] showing efforts to deskill the nursing work force will increase deaths, adverse events and costs. This conclusion was also restated in a recent editorial in this journal by one of us. [4]

    Aiken and Sloane discuss the paper as though it is about skill mix, characterizing our findings as “counter” to our earlier published papers that did analyze skill mix. However, the current paper and the recent Griffith’s paper Aiken and Sloane also reference[5], “examine nursing support staffing not as a substitute for RNs, as studies of skill mix do, but …rather examine the impact of shortfalls in support staffing given established RN- nursing support staffing models.” What our paper and Griffiths paper do is examine shortfalls from established levels of nurse support staffing as a complement of typical RN staffing withi...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    Authors of article on which editorial was written