Nurse-Patient Ratio Linked to Death Rate

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HICAGO, Oct. 22 — Patients have a greater chance of dying after surgery in hospitals where the nurses must take care of more patients, according to a new study done at 168 hospitals in Pennsylvania.

In the study, reported in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that each additional patient in a nurse's workload meant an increase of about 7 percent in the likelihood that the patient would die within 30 days of admission.

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This was the second major study this year to suggest that the nationwide nursing shortage was having a detrimental effect on patients. In May, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that at hospitals with fewer registered nurses, patients were more likely to suffer complications like urinary infections and pneumonia, to stay in the hospital longer and to die from treatable conditions like shock and gastrointestinal bleeding.

The National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health paid for the new study.