Effect of a Staffing Strategy Based on Voluntary Increase in Working Hours on Quality of Patient Care in a Hospital in Kwazulu-Natal

Two of the issues facing the South African Health Care System are the shortage of nursing staff and a lack o f adequate skills to provide quality patient care. The hospital under study experienced a critical shortage o f applications from professional registered nurses, consequently a staffing strategy was implemented to overcome the shortage o f nurses and to maintain quality patient care. The strategy introduced encouraged nurses to voluntarily work an additional ten hours per week with remuneration.A non-experimental, descriptive design with a quantitative approach was applied to investigate the effect of a staffing strategy aimed at improving the quality o f care in a hospital in Kwa-Zulu Natal based on voluntarily increasing staff working hours. The investigation compared the quality o f nursing care before and after the implementation of the staffing strategy through retrospective audits of randomly selected patient files 372 (11%) of the total population o f3400 files were audited.A random sample of 4 boxes each containing a 100 patient files, o f a total of 34 boxes, was selected from the hospital filing system. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed and correlations between various variables using the Chi-square test. No statistically significant differences (p<0.05) were found between the quality of nursing care before and after the implementation of the management strategy, even though deterioration of results after the implementation was observed. The study shows that the quality o f nursing care in most wards deteriorated after implementation. The staffing strategy failed to improve or maintain the quality of nursing care