Examining the impacts of nurse staffing, skill mix and experience on quality and costs in long-term care

The Foundation's Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative was designed to provide funding for interdisciplinary studies that address critical gaps in what is known about nursing quality and for the synthesis, translation, and dissemination of results to key stakeholders. This project will examine whether there is a causal relationship between nursing input (i.e., staffing and human capital characteristics) and patient outcomes in long-term care (LTC) facilities, and will analyze efficiency by studying the tradeoffs between nursing personnel costs and cost savings due to improved patient outcomes. Using a unique longitudinal database of the entire population of LTC facilities operated by the Veterans Administration in fiscal years 2003-2007, the team will link a variety of patient outcomes to detailed measures of the nursing input, controlling for other factors that can influence patient outcomes. Site visits will also be conducted and multivariate fixed-effect regressions will be estimated using monthly data.