A recent study published in Circulation: Heart Failure reveals that, for heart failure patients, the day that they're admitted to the hospital may dictate the length of their stay.

The researchers reviewed data for more than 48,000 heart failure patients admitted to 259 different US hospitals. Those admitted on Tuesdays had the shortest stays, while patients admitted on Thursdays and Fridays had the longest stays. This finding didn't hold true for heart attack patients.

Researchers theorize that the discrepancy in length of stay could be do to reduced staffing over the weekend. Though many hospitals are already eschewing the old trend of running on a tighter staff over the weekend. If short staffing is to blame for the increased lengths of stay, correcting the staffing issue could potentially save hundreds of thousands for a hospital.

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The more nurses there are in each hospital, the fewer patient infections will occur, according to a new piece of research. The sheer amount of infection-reducing procedures used by nurses to prevent infections makes this research's conclusion pretty easy to agree with.

Infections caused by ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) are serious and are easily caused by bacteria entering the patients lung when a ventilator is used. The more a nurse can attend to the specific needs of each individual patient, the less of an occurrence of these situations is a result.

Do hospitals measure the types of patient needs (statistically speaking) against the budgetary constraints of nursing staff along with many other variables to find the best mix of efficiency and top-flight patient care? I'd hope so, and any good hospital administration professional should also.

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