May 08, 2018

Fewer patients with dementia die after surgery when nurses are better educated

 

Patients in hospitals that employ more educated nurses have better survival rates, according to new research out of the US.

The higher the proportion of college educated nurses in a hospital, the higher the survival rate, the research showed, with the strongest increase in survival recorded for patients living with dementia.

In 2010, the US Institute of Medicine called for 80 per cent of hospital nurses to have at least a college degree by 2020.

“Our findings suggest that transitioning to a largely (college-educated) nursing workforce… would contribute to improved surgical outcomes for this population,” said lead study author Elizabeth White, a geriatric nurse practitioner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia.

“College educated nurses spend more time training for sicker patients”

“Nurses with at least a bachelor’s degree have likely spent more time training to care for sicker patients with a greater burden of medical illnesses and who require more complicated medical care,” Jennifer Watt, a geriatrician at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto in Canada, told the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The study

The study followed 46,163 people with Alzheimer’s or dementia and a control group of 307,170 patients who didn’t have these conditions.

Overall, 12,369 patients, or 3.5 percent, died within 30 days of admission to the hospital, according to reports in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Sadly, the mortality rate for dementia patients, at 8 per cent, was much higher than that for people without dementia, at less than 3 per cent.

In the hospitals examined, 38 per cent of nurses had at least a four-year bachelor’s degree, but in some hospitals no nurses had bachelor degrees, while in others the proportion was as high as 74 per cent.

The researchers found that for each 10 per cent increase in the proportion of nurses with at least a bachelor’s degree, the chance of dying was 4 per cent lower for patients without dementia and an even more impressive 10 per cent lower for patients with dementia.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

‘We are the experts’ says dementia advocate Kevyn Morris

When asked if moving into an aged care home is something that he will ever consider, Kevyn says there are several such loopholes in the system that deter him from ever wanting to step foot inside an aged care facility. “I can answer it this way,” he says, “The only way I'll go in [to an aged care home] is when I don't know.” Read More

“Outright lies”: Families impacted after animal cruelty brothers refuse to release aged care home deposits

Brothers who were banned from the chicken industry for a combined 17 years have now been hit with a non-compliance notice for failing to return refundable aged care home deposits to impacted families. Read More

Grandmother Who Only Eats McDonald’s Will Not Go Without During Lockdown

One of the most distressing aspects of caring for someone living with dementia can be when they become highly selective about what they will eat or refuse to eat anything at all. Recently, a family from the English city of Liverpool faced a worrying dilemma when McDonald’s restaurants in the UK announced that they would... Read More
Advertisement