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Biomedical subjects

Donna Thomson

Publications and source records attributed to Donna Thomson.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Work-related disability in Canadian nurses.

PURPOSE: To determine factors contributing to high registered nurse (RN) injury claim rates in Canadian hospitals. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of secondary 1998-99 data for RNs (N = 8,044) in Ontario, Canada, linked at the hospital level (n = 127). METHODS: Descriptive statistics, correlations, and logistic regression analyses were conducted. RESULTS: The odds of a high RN lost-time claim rate increased by 70% for each quartile increase in the percentage of RNs reporting more than 1 hour of overtime per week. The odds of a high RN musculoskeletal lost-time claim rate decreased by 64% for every one unit increase in the hospital-level score on the nurse-physician relationship subscale. CONCLUSIONS: To retain and optimize scarce hospital nursing resources, strategies to address overtime, sick time, and nurse-physician relationships might provide fiscal and human benefits.

Absenteeism↗
PubMed2003

Beyond demographic change in human resources planning: an extended framework and application to nursing.

OBJECTIVES: To introduce health care production functions into human resources planning and to apply the approach to analysing the need for registered nurses in Ontario during a period of major reduction in inpatient capacity. METHODS: Measurement of changes in services delivered by acute care hospitals in Ontario between 1994/95 and 1998/99, and comparison with changes in the mix of human resources, non-human resources and patient needs. RESULTS: Inpatient episodes per nurse fell by almost 2%. At the same time the number of beds was cut by over 20%. As a result, the number of patients per bed increased by 12%. Allowing for severity, there was a 20% reduction in beds per episode and a 3.7% reduction in nurses per episode. CONCLUSIONS: The demands on nurses in acute care hospitals have increased as an increasing number of severity-adjusted episodes are served using fewer beds by a reduced number of nurses. Human resources planning traditionally only considers the effects of demographic change on the need for and supply of health care. Failure to recognize the variable and endogenous nature of other health care inputs leads to false impressions about the adequacy of existing supplies of human resources. Consideration of human resources in the context of the production function for health services provides a meaningful way of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of human resources planning.

Demography↗
PubMed2002

Measuring the hospital practice environment: a Canadian context.

The primary purpose of this study is to document the psychometric properties of the revised Nursing Work Index (NWI-R) in the context of a large Canadian sample of registered nurses. A self-administered survey containing the NWI-R was completed by 17,965 registered nurses working in 415 hospitals in three Canadian provinces. Using exploratory principal components analysis, with a forced one-factor solution, the practice environment index was obtained. In addition, key assumptions were tested from previous work about the rationale for the aggregation of NWI-R responses. In the Canadian context the one-factor solution provides a parsimonious index of the practice environment of registered nurses working in acute care hospitals. Further work is needed to determine the predictive capability of this index and its relevance to cross-national organizational contexts.

Acute Disease↗