Quantifying nursing care done (or left undone)

Sick newborns require large amounts of nursing time, so what happens when nurses have to care for too many babies? By making direct observations of the care that is given this important new research identified how much care is missed. More care is missed when nurses have more babies to care for, showing the direct consequences of health care worker shortages.

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David is a post-doctoral researcher currently leading work on nursing services research aimed at developing indicators, tools and approaches for evaluating the quality of nursing care delivered in hospitals. He co-leads the Health Services that Deliver for Newborns programme of work whose focus is understanding the burden, access and quality of newborn care services. He holds a Master of Science in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam.

His previous research work has spanned a range of disciplines including, clinical trials, evaluation of quality of care within hospitals and exploration of the application of various statistical methods (propensity score analysis, multi-level models and statistical process control) to routine data.

David is currently funded by the Health Systems Research Initiative (HSRI) to undertake work on the role of nurses in the delivery of quality care and the implications of the nursing workforce deficit on the care provided. In this work he hopes to develop and pilot indicators and tools for measuring the work done by nurses. This work is being done in collaboration with Oxford University, Aga Khan University School of Nursing and Midwifery, Ministry of Health, Nursing Council of Kenya and National Nurses Association of Kenya.

He has broad interests’ in the use of epidemiology to monitor disease trends, interventions effects, identify quality of care gaps and the use of this data for effective decision making with a specific interest in how the nursing workforce influences the quality of care provided. His future work aims at developing human resource interventions as well as optimising approaches for nursing care provision.