Additional research on the determinants of nurse outcomes, the quality of patient care, and the impact of rationing of nursing care on patient outcomes in neonatal intensive care units is required. The Neonatal Extent of Work Rationing Instrument appears to be a useful tool for monitoring the extent of rationing of nursing care in neonatal units.

People are living to older age. Falls constitute a leading cause of injuries, hospitalization and deaths among the elderly. Older people fall more often for a variety of reasons: alterations in physiology and physical functioning, and the use (and misuse) of medications needed to manage their multiple conditions. Pharmacological factors that place the elderly at greater risk of drug-related side effects include changes in body composition, serum albumin, total body water, and hepatic and renal functioning. Drug use is one of the most modifiable risk factors for falls and falls-related injuries. Fall-risk increasing drugs (FRIDs) include drugs for cardiovascular diseases (such as digoxin, type 1a anti-arrhythmics and diuretics), benzodiazepines, antidepressants, antiepileptics, antipsychotics, antiparkinsonian drugs, opioids and urological spasmolytics. Psychotropic and benzodiazepine drug use is most consistently associated with falls. Despite the promise of a more favourable side-effect profile, evidence shows that atypical antipsychotic medications and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants do not reduce the risk of falls and hip fractures. Despite multiple efforts with regards to managing medication-associated falls, there is no clear evidence for an effective intervention. Stopping or lowering the dose of psychotropic drugs and benzodiazepines does work, but ensuring a patient remains off these drugs is a challenge. Computer-assisted alerts coupled with electronic prescribing tools are a promising approach to lowering the risk of falls as the use of information technologies expands within healthcare.

While evidence suggests that higher nurse education is associated with lower risks of mortality and failure to rescue, longitudinal studies are needed to better ascertain these associations and determine the specific thresholds that minimize risks. Further studies are needed to better document the association of nurse education and experience with other nursing-sensitive adverse events, as well as the benefits to patients and organizations of the Institute of Medicine's recommendation.

Background Venous thromboembolisms (VTEs), which include deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), are associated with significant mortality, morbidity, and cost in hospitalized patients. To evaluate the success of preventive measures, accurate and efficient methods for monitoring VTE rates are needed. Therefore, we sought to determine the accuracy of statistical natural language processing (NLP) for identifying DVT and PE from electronic health record data.Methods We randomly sampled 2000 narrative radiology reports from patients with a suspected DVT/PE in Montreal (Canada) between 2008 and 2012. We manually identified DVT/PE within each report, which served as our reference standard. Using a bag-of-words approach, we trained 10 alternative support vector machine (SVM) models predicting DVT, and 10 predicting PE. SVM training and testing was performed with nested 10-fold cross-validation, and the average accuracy of each model was measured and compared.Results On manual review, 324 (16.2%) reports were DVT-positive and 154 (7.7%) were PE-positive. The best DVT model achieved an average sensitivity of 0.80 (95% CI 0.76 to 0.85), specificity of 0.98 (98% CI 0.97 to 0.99), positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.89 (95% CI 0.85 to 0.93), and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.98 (95% CI 0.97 to 0.99). The best PE model achieved sensitivity of 0.79 (95% CI 0.73 to 0.85), specificity of 0.99 (95% CI 0.98 to 0.99), PPV of 0.84 (95% CI 0.75 to 0.92), and AUC of 0.99 (95% CI 0.98 to 1.00).Conclusions Statistical NLP can accurately identify VTE from narrative radiology reports.

BackgroundEvidence internationally suggests that staffing constraints and non-supportive work environments result in the rationing of nursing interventions (that is, limiting or omitting interventions for particular patients), which in turn may influence patient outcomes. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), preliminary studies have found that discharge preparation and infant comfort care are among the most frequently rationed nursing interventions. However, it is unknown if the rationing of discharge preparation is related to lower perceptions of parent and infant readiness for NICU discharge, and if reports of increased rationing of infant comfort care are related to lower levels of perceived neonatal pain control. The purpose of this study was to assess these relationships.MethodsIn late 2014, a cross-sectional survey was mailed to 285 Registered Nurses (RNs) working in one of 7 NICUs in the province of Quebec (Canada). The survey contained validated measures of care rationing, parent and infant readiness for discharge, and pain control, as well as items measuring RNs’ characteristics. Multivariate regression was used to examine the association between care rationing, readiness for discharge and pain control, while adjusting for RNs’ characteristics and clustering within NICUs.ResultsOverall, 125 RNs completed the survey; a 44.0 % response rate. Among the respondents, 28.0 and 40.0 % reported rationing discharge preparation and infant comfort care “often” or “very often”, respectively. Additionally, 15.2 % of respondents felt parents and infants were underprepared for NICU discharge, and 54.4 % felt that pain was not well managed on their unit. In multivariate analyses, the rationing of discharge preparation was negatively related to RNs’ perceptions of parent and infant readiness for discharge, while reports of rationing of parental support and teaching and infant comfort care were associated with less favourable perceptions of neonatal pain control.ConclusionsThe rationing of nursing interventions appears to influence parent and infant readiness for discharge, as well as pain control in NICUs. Future investigations, in neonatal nursing care as well as in other nursing specialties, should address objectively measured patient outcomes (such as objective pain assessments and post-discharge outcomes assessed through administrative data).

Aims: To collate and synthesize published research on interventions developed and tested to prevent or reduce the rates of rationed or missed nursing care in healthcare institutions. Background: Rationed and missed nursing care has been widely studied, including its predictors and associations with patient and nurse outcomes. Design: Scoping review. Data sources: We searched for eligible studies, published between 1980-2019, in six electronic databases. Review methods: Researchers independently screened the abstracts of the retrieved studies using the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The decision of whether or not to include any given study was consensus-based. Results: The search yielded 1,815 records, of which 13 were included. Three studies reported structural interventions, namely increased nurse staffing and improved nursing teamwork, both resulted in significant reductions in the rates of rationed or missed nursing care. The remaining 10 studies reported on process interventions: four concerned reminders (via technology or designated persons) and seven described interventions to change or optimize the relevant care processes. All 10 process interventions contributed to significant reductions in the rates of missed nursing care. Conclusions: The results of the scoping review indicate that specific interventions can positively influence the performance of a selected nursing care activity, for example fall prevention. There is no evidence of a global reduction of rationed and missed nursing care through these interventions. Impact: Clinicians, managers and researchers can use the results for adapting and implementing interventions to reduce rationed and missed nursing care. K E Y W O R D S decision-making, interventions, nurse staffing, nursing care, prevention, quality of care, rationed and missed nursing care, scoping review, teamwork | 551 SCHUBERT ET al.

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