Outcome transparency has put significant pressure on nurse executives to achieve high-quality nursing care. As these pressures mount, so has the call for urgent change to transform the hospital patient care environment. Work environment inefficiencies that serve as obstacles to efficient performance of RNs threaten patient safety and care quality by decreasing
the amount of nurse practice time devoted to direct patient and family care activities.Inpatient staff nurses are kept from the bedside by a variety of system inefficiencies and failures.Storfjell et al reported that medical-surgical nurses spent more time in support activities than providing patient care. More than one-third of RNs’ time was spent on non-value-added tasks, representing an average of 28% of RN wages. Annually, non-value-added activities totaled more than 1 million
dollars for the average medical-surgical unit. Strategies to increase nurse-patient time, frequently targeted at increasing nurse-staffing levels, have failed because system inefficiencies, the root cause of the problem,remain unaddressed. Improving the hospital care environment and increasing the amount of nursing time spent with patients positively affect patient outcomes.