Nurses with More Education, Safe Workloads Associated with Reduced Surgical Mortality

Increasing a nurse’s workload by one patient increased the likelihood of an inpatient dying within 30 days of admission by 7%, according to the results of a study published online February 26, 2014, in theLancet. The researchers reviewed the discharge data for 422,730 patients age 50 or older who underwent common surgeries at 300 hospitals in nine European countries and conducted surveys of 26,516 nurses practicing in the study hospitals to assess how factors such as nurse staffing and nurse education affect mortality among surgical patients.