BACKGROUND The health workforce has a crucial position in healthcare, and effective distribution of the workforce is one of the critical areas for healthcare improvement. This requires a proper understanding of the allocation of healthcare providers including staffing levels and staffing variability within a healthcare system. High variability may imply significant differences in outcomes and g...

AIMS To identify the work factors that predict intense low back pain (LBP) and LBP related sick leaves in nurses' aides. METHODS The sample comprised 4266 randomly selected Norwegian nurses' aides, not bothered or only a little bothered by LBP during the previous three months, and not on sick leave when completing a mailed questionnaire in 1999. Of these, 3808 (89.3%) completed a second quest...

BACKGROUND In Canada, healthcare aides (also referred to as nurse aides, personal support workers, nursing assistants) are unregulated personnel who provide 70-80% of direct care to residents living in nursing homes. Although they are an integral part of the care team their contributions to the resident care planning process are not always acknowledged in the organization. The purpose of the Sa...

BACKGROUND It is uncertain whether lower levels of staffing by nurses at hospitals are associated with an increased risk that patients will have complications or die. METHODS We used administrative data from 1997 for 799 hospitals in 11 states (covering 5,075,969 discharges of medical patients and 1,104,659 discharges of surgical patients) to examine the relation between the amount of care pr...

As has been highlighted in recent papers in the International Journal of Nursing Studies, there are many significant challenges associated with the growing need for internationally educated nurses in many countries (Xiao, Willis and Jeffers 2014). In the United Kingdom, for example, in 2013/14 there were 6,228 nursing registrations from abroad – an increase of nearly 45% on the previous year, w...

This article aims to contribute to comparative welfare state research by analysing the everyday work life of long-term care facility workers in Canada and Sweden. The study's empirical base was a survey of fixed and open-ended questions; this article presents results from a subset of respondents (Care Aides and Assistant Nurses) working in facilities in three Canadian provinces (n=557) and acro...

BACKGROUND Medical care systems in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures were greatly damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE), which struck on 11 March 2011. The shortage of nurses in this area was concerning; however, temporal trends have not been investigated. This study aimed to investigate the trends in the geographic distribution of total nursing staff per population in the sec...

INTRODUCTION Following twenty years of economic and social growth, Liberia's fourteen-year civil war destroyed its health system, with most of the health workforce leaving the country. Following the inauguration of the Sirleaf administration in 2006, the Ministry of Health & Social Welfare (MOHSW) has focused on rebuilding, with an emphasis on increasing the size and capacity of its human resou...