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