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Studies show that higher nurse staffing levels prevent complications and unnecessary deaths:

 Low nurse staffing levels leave nurses too overburdened to monitor patients or prevent medical errors adequately, which cause up to 98,000 preventable deaths each year.

Source: “Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses,” a report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released November 2003.

 For each additional patient over four in a registered nurse’s care, the risk of death increases by 7 percent for surgical patients. In hospitals with eight patients per nurse, patients have a 31 percent greater risk of dying than those in hospitals with four patients per nurse.

Source: Research by Linda A. Aiken, PhD, RN, University of Pennsylvania, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), October 23-30, 2002.

 Understaffing was a contributing factor in 24 percent of all sentinel events (unanticipated incidents in hospitals that led to patient deaths or injuries) reported to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO).

Source: “Health Care at the Crossroads,” a report by JCAHO released August 7, 2002.

 In hospitals with fewer registered nurses, patients are 2 to 9 percent more likely to suffer complications like urinary infections and pneumonia, 3 to 5 percent more likely to have a longer stay in the hospital and 2.5 percent more likely to die from “failure to rescue” (conditions that might have been reversed if treated in time).

Source: A study by Dr. Jack Needleman of the Harvard School of Public Health published in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 30, 2002.

 An extra hour of nursing attention per surgical patient each day cuts the risk of urinary tract infection by nearly 10 percent and the risk of contracting pneumonia by 8 percent.

Source: A study by Christine Kovner, PhD, RN, and Petter J. Gergen, MD, MPH, published in Image: Journal of Nursing Scholarship, Fourth Quarter 1998.

 A higher proportion of care by registered nurses results in a lower rate of medication errors and patient falls.

Source: A study by M.A. Blegan and T. Vaughn, published in Nursing Economics, 16(4), 1998.