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