What is it about?
CHALLENGING RULES There is a debate on whether a well-established payment system for nursing care can lead healthcare organizations to have more nurses through proving the value of nursing in a visible way such as a value of money. What about establishing a law with strict regulations to secure a sufficient nursing workforce? That also cannot be a permanent solution to the nursing shortage.
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Why is it important?
CREATING SHARED VALUES: PARK'S SWEET SPOT THEORY-DRIVEN CENTRAL ‘OPTIMUM NURSE STAFFING ZONE’ Mathematical Programming has a noticeable limitation in providing a reliable/stable/sturdy Optimum Nurse Staffing Zone because the technique produces only one single best optimal point (Sweet Spot) under a given model setting. Sweet Spot can be continuously changed as the model setting(s), selected quality/cost variable(s), chosen reference(s) indicating the method to transform the selected quality variable(s) into a value of money, and so forth, change. Park's Theory (2017b) covers this limitation by providing an intersectional Optimum Nurse Staffing Zone, “Central-’Optimum Nurse Staffing Zone’” among the given model settings.
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This page is a summary of: Challenging rules, creating values: Park's sweet spot theory-driven central-‘optimum nurse staffing zone’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, December 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/jan.13496.
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Optimizing Staffing, Quality and Cost in Home Healthcare Nursing: Theory Synthesis.
* Note. This article is published under an exclusive license agreement with John Wiley & Sons, Limited; Park’s Optimized Nurse Staffing (Sweet Spot) Estimation Theory: Copyright ⓒ 2016 Park, Claire Su-Yeon. All Rights Reserved. The original copyright has been registered in both Korea [C-2016-031091] and U.S.A. [TX 8-371-760] with an effective copyright date of 06 Dec 2016; patent-pending in Korea (Park’s User-friendly Cloud-based Intersectional Optimized Nurse Staffing (Sweet Spot) Decision-making Support System [10-2017-0052130] with an effective patent-pending date of 24 Apr 2017); the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent claiming priority of the Korean patent application pending [in progress]. Use of the contents, illustrations, and even ideas in Park’s Optimized Nurse Staffing (Sweet Spot) Estimation Theory, even in part, requires written permission from the copyright/patent holder. Under international copyright/PCT law, anyone violating a copyright/patent will face legal punishment.
Balancing Quality, Cost and the Nursing Workforce.
How can we achieve value-based nursing care resulting from improved quality yet reduced cost? We long for the best point of leverage balancing quality and cost; however, most studies seem to still present fragmented “snap shots” of the phenomenon of interest. We should be mindful of this because an unclear picture may lead to muddled policy-making.
Thinking Outside the Box
Much evidence supports that having more nurses leads to better patient outcomes. However, why is nurse staffing still lacking in practice? Previous studies on the nursing workforce have, so far, focused on determining “more nurses and better patient outcomes.” However, a controversial debate on the cost-effectiveness of hiring more nurses still continues (Aiken, Cimiotti, Sloane, Smith, Flynn, & Neff, 2011). When it comes to nursing workforce policy-materializing in practice, the inconclusiveness of nursing efficiency is considered to be one of the critical reasons for the failure to narrow the gap between the ideal and the real. How can we fix this two-sided coin? The bottleneck is impeding us from moving forward from a “volume-driven” to “value-driven” healthcare delivery system. There is no more time for delay. We need to rethink this issue from a different angle.
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