Performance in Nursing

Abstract

Nurses spend more time with patients than do any other health care providers, and patient outcomes are affected by nursing care quality. Thus, improvements in patient safety can be achieved by improving nurse performance. We review the literature on nursing performance, including cognitive, physical, and organizational factors that affect such performance, focusing on research studies that reported original data from nurse participants. Our review indicates that the nurse's work system often does not accommodate human limits and capabilities and that nurses work under cognitive, perceptual, and physical overloads. Specifically, nurses engage in multiple tasks under cognitive load and frequent interruptions, and they encounter insufficient lighting, illegible handwriting, and poorly designed labels. They spend a substantial amount of their time walking, work long shifts, and experience a high rate of musculoskeletal disorders. Research is overdue in the areas of cognitive processes in nursing, effects of interruptions on nursing performance, communications during patient handoffs, and situation awareness in nursing. Human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) professionals must play a key role in the redesign of the nurses' work system to determine how overloads can be reduced and how the limits and capabilities of performance can be accommodated. Collaboration between nurses and HF/E specialists is essential to improve nursing performance and patient safety.

Developing Nursing Management Protocol for Maternity Nurses Regarding Emergency Obstetric Care

“…This result disagrees with Attia [3] who found that there was no statistically significant relation between nurses' performance & their age. Also, this result agrees with Delucia et al [11] who studied Performance in nursing found that work experience influence nurses' performance.…”

Conservation of resources theory in nurse burnout and patient safety

“…The four resources of the Conservation of Resources theory that represented in Table (i.e., objects, conditions, personal characteristics, energy) may lead to nurse burnout if these resources are threatened by either perceived or actual loss of resources or inability to gain such resources. Nurse burnout is known to be a type of psychological stress, which may result in reduced efficacy in performance in the workplace (DeLucia, Ott, & Palmieri, ). One consequence of nurse performance is the safety of patients.…”

Integrated Information Displays for ICU Nurses: Field Observations, Display Design, and Display Evaluation

“…Other research confirms that nurses are struggling to perceive all relevant information (DeLucia, et al, 2009;Potter, et al, 2005), and that many nursing tasks are not completely supported by a single display (Weir, et al, 2007). In other studies, nurses preferred new displays over the ones they currently had (Ireland, James, Howes, & Wilson, 1997;Miller & Sanderson, 2003;Thursky & Mahemoff, 2007).…”

“…Up to an estimated 98,000 annual deaths in US hospitals alone are attributed to preventable adverse events (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999). A portion of the errors could be attributed to the ICU setting and the significant cognitive overload of ICU nurses' work (DeLucia, Ott, & Palmieri, 2009). Cognitive overload is exacerbated by the poor ergonomics of information displays in the ICU (Alexander & Staggers, 2009).…”