Ourega-Zoé Ejebu

Low nurse staffing can harm patients, but are the costs of fixing the problems worth the benefits or are there cost-effective alternatives? The NHS, in common with many health systems around the world, faces shortages of registered nurses. Common sense and a huge body of evidence suggest this is far from ideal to deliver high-quality patient care. In acute general hospitals, when there are fewer registered nurses, more patient care is missed, quality is reduced and patient outcomes are worse.

Section snippets What is already known • The evidence supporting palliative care has primarily been focused on patients with cancer and hospitalized patients. • The evidence regarding the effectiveness of palliative care on community-dwelling patients with heart failure needs to be evaluated.

Introduction Shortages of nurses is a global problem projected to worsen until at least 2030.1 2 Having too few registered nurses on duty can have a detrimental impact on the quality of care and patient outcomes.3 4 The COVID-19 pandemic also highlighted the limitation of the National Health Services (NHS) in providing high-quality patient care due to the lack of registered nurses.