A comparison of nursing care requirements of patients in long-term geriatric and acute care nursing units.

It is commonly assumed that elderly patients in long-term care facilities require less total care and less professional care than patients in active 'treatment' settings. However, no objective data have been available to support or refute these assumptions. This study examined patient classification data obtained from eight acute care medical and surgical units and four long-term care geriatric units over a 1-year period. Results indicated that (1) geriatric patients in long-term care units had differing (as opposed to similar) nursing care needs, (2) nursing care requirements of geriatric patients in several long-term care units differed from those of patients in another long-term care unit, (3) geriatric patients in the selected long-term care units required at least as much nursing care as those in the medical surgical units, and (4) the long-term care units had many patients with extensive nursing care requirements but no patients with very complex requirements when compared with the medical/surgical units. The potential impact of these findings on staffing of long-term care units is considerable. Issues relating to reliability, validity and comparability are discussed. There is a great need to utilize standardized, state-of-the-art methods for nursing workload measurement to facilitate comparisons of nursing care requirements of geriatric long-term care patients with those of patients in other areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]