That's not how healthcare works. That it is does not function that way is why free-at-point-of-use public healthcare systems are capable of working.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but the idea that doubling nurses doubles the amount of patient care shows an ignorance of the healthcare system. "Patient care" is a nebulous term and needs to be further defined in that statement. Do you now get two catheters instead of one? Or get your vitals taken twice as often? Both double patient care but only one is relevant.

I could definitely imagine nurses having twice as much time to carefully read my charts, or twice as much time to sleep at night and be well rested so they don't fuck things up, or being able to come by and help with something twice as quickly

That would provide better patient outcomes, I agree. Whether hiring more nurses translates to actually doubling that, is another question. To be clear, I'm not saying that increased staff is not part of the solution; it's just been my experience that it's rarely the sole part (or often even the majority part) of the solution.

It's because it would actually double the amount of care on most floors, because they're usually at 60% of the staffing they need as a start because they've been able to get away with that for years.

That doesn't really answer the question. "it would actually double the amount of care". It would double the amount of staff hours. How those staff hours are used is a measure of patient care and not all hours are equally relevant to the patient.

As an example, if we assume you are a software engineer and you double your work hours, will you double your code output? Probably not, just like it's not a 1:1 translation of nurse hours to patient care.

Comments like this are showing just how much you don't understand maintaining a service level based care, and are stuck in thinking in terms of producing a product.

Combined with willfully ignoring that basically all floors are intentionally understaffed and have been for years.

I can tell you from my years in healthcare that many of the people who think they know how the system works only have a very myopic understanding and they usually are the one's who have the most confidence that their simple solution will fix the problem. Unfortunately, there's a lot of nuance in complex systems like healthcare.

We probably agree about the staffing levels to an extent, but I would be curious to hear the staffing estimation methodologies used in your experience.

Yeah, I agree. You sound like many healthcare admins I've worked with and for.

I'm not sure its the flex in this argument you think it is.

I wasn't healthcare admin and most of my department was staffed with nurses. But we were very data oriented and it helped buffer us from emotional responses to problems.

I have no doubt your emotionally detached analysis decided the floors were adequately/overstaffed since the nurses hadn't all quit yet or gone on strike.

I mean they clearly are still working there, they can always do a bit more to cover right?

I think you are are either misinterpreting my stance or transferring an argument from your personally experience. Also, you may want to revisit the HN guidelines[1]

My position is not that they were always adequately staffed, but that in my experience increasing staffing did not fix the problems as expected because the problems were rooted in more systemic issues. As I've stated elsewhere staffing may be part of the solution but rarely a panacea. Also, my stance is that fixing the systemic issues will help them do less non-patient-centered work so they can focus more on being a healthcare provider, where they are the most valuable.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for your thoughtful responses, you seem to be the only person here with experience trying to solve the actual problem in a data driven way