No, the problem is not unique to your hospital alone! The situation you describe in your letter is due to 2 complexities in hospital nursing practice that are increasingly being recognized. And, thanks to managers and clinical nurses in Magnet and other “excellence-recognized” hospitals and clinical units, evidence-based practices useful in dealing with these complexities are being identified and implemented.

The Simultaneity complexity—care for multiple patient simultaneously —has long been recognized as unique to the professional nursing practice of clinical nurses in hospitals. In contrast to medicine, law, and other professions in which the client-practitioner relationship is based on sequential care to one client at a time, clinical nurses are expected to care for 2 to 5 patients simultaneously. Unlike some professions (teachers in classrooms, lawyers in class-action suits, or pastors with their parishioners) in which the client-practitioner relationship is based on groups of similar clients with similar needs, nurses...

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