A new study conducted by the University of Southampton suggests that not just doctors and nurses, but a range of healthcare staff, including allied healthcare professionals (AHPs) like physiotherapists, radiographers, dieticians, and occupational therapists, significantly influence patient safety.
A New Look at Hospital Staffing and Patient Safety
Researchers from the University’s School of Health Sciences analyzed national hospital data in England and found that hospitals with higher levels of AHP staff reported significantly lower mortality rates.
The findings of this research, which is the first of its kind to focus on multi-disciplinary staffing, are published in the journal BMJ Open.
The team of researchers collected publicly available data on staffing levels from all NHS staff groups.
They measured this as the ratio of occupied beds to staff numbers and also examined data on hospital characteristics and patient deaths.
By linking these diverse data sources (from 2015 to 2019), the team studied the connection between staffing levels of various staff groups and the risk of patients dying in 138 general acute care NHS Trusts.
How Staffing Levels Affect Mortality Rates
The study found that hospitals, where doctors and allied health professionals were responsible for fewer beds, had significantly lower mortality rates.
However, hospitals with more healthcare assistants and assistants to allied health professionals reported higher mortality rates.
Co-author, Dr. Chiara Dall’Ora, reflected on this finding, “It made us think when we found that in some cases, having more support staff was linked to higher mortality.
One possibility might be that this changes the work of other staff groups—for example if there are more healthcare assistants, registered nurses might spend more time supervising them.
Whatever the reason, it shows that the right balance of nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, and other support staff on wards is crucial to patient safety.”
The Increased Risk of Death
The research also revealed that for each additional bed a doctor or an allied health professional was responsible for, the patient risk of death increased by 4 percent.
For registered nurses, each additional bed they had to manage increased the patient risk of death by 7 percent.
Although this figure was not statistically significant in this study, it does suggest, based on previous research, that higher levels of registered nurses per bed are associated with lower mortality.
The Impact of Staff Shortages
Study lead, Professor Peter Griffiths, emphasized the consequences of staff shortages in light of these findings.
“Our study shows potentially significant consequences of shortages of allied health professionals, given the crucial role they play in treating patients, as well as the widely publicized shortages of doctors and nurses,” he said.
Griffiths and his team encourage further research in this area, using more detailed data to explore relationships at the hospital level and the ward level.
They hope this study will inspire dialogue about ensuring safe staffing levels for all groups of staff at policy and workforce planning levels.
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The study was published in BMJ Open.
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