SPOTLIGHT: Nursing inefficiencies

Nurses have long suspected that they spend far too much time shuffling paper and chasing down equipment rather than caring for patients, and now there's some data to back them up. A new survey from Jackson Healthcare in Alpharetta, Ga., finds that hospital-based nurses across the country can devote as much as 25 percent of their time filling out forms, documenting patient encounters in multiple locations and hunting down supplies and medical devices. Many of the more than 2,400 nurses and nursing managers surveyed recommended solving this problem with additional staff support, elimination of redundant regulatory requirements and, yes, hospital-wide communications technology. It will be interesting to see if the federal HIT stimulus changes these conditions. Summary

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