Background: Staff shortages, reduced budgets, and high acuity of violent psychiatric patients can create challenges in psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs).
Local problem: Staffing of the psychiatric unit was based on patient census rather than evidence-based practices.
Methods: A pre-/postintervention design was used to examine changes in nursing satisfaction and patient outcomes as measured with the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) survey results.
Interventions: A psychiatric specific acuity tool was implemented on the PICU of a Veterans Administration hospital.
Results: After an initial decrease related to the COVID-19 pandemic, total acuity and the total number of nurses remained relatively stable while the unit census declined. NDNQI survey results improved with the largest being a 52-percentile increase for the quality-of-care summary measure.
Conclusions: An acuity tool can help standardize practice, determine fair patient assignments among staff, increase nurse satisfaction, and promote best practices for patient safety.
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