Leveraging Nurse-Patient Assignments to Improve Outcomes in Intensive Care Available to Purchase

Every day in intensive care units (ICUs) across the globe, critically ill patients lie side by side, facing unique circumstances and challenges in the struggle to survive. In these high-stakes environments, the severity of a patient’s condition can affect not just their own health outcomes but those of their neighbors in adjacent beds. This complex dynamic has significant implications for nursing practice and patient care, as revealed by recent research we published in Critical Care Medicine.¹  Our study sheds light on the often-overlooked interdependencies among ICU patients on the same unit and highlights the need for creative thinking about how our approach to nurse staffing might be better used as a lever to improve ICU quality.

In a 1:2 nurse-patient pairing, each patient has a “copatient”—the other patient cared for by a same nurse. We examined whether the illness severity of the copatient affected the patient’s outcome. We...