A human factors framework and study of the effect of nursing workload on patient safety and employee quality of working life (January 2011)

Summary

Nursing workload is increasingly thought to contribute to both nurses' quality of working life and quality/safety of care. Prior studies lack a coherent model for conceptualising and measuring the effects of workload in healthcare. In contrast, this study, published in BMJ Quality & Safety, conceptualised a human factors model for workload specifying workload at three distinct levels of analysis and having multiple nurse and patient outcomes.