A new study by my colleague Heather Tubbs-Cooley, PhD, RN out of Cincinnati Children's Hospital demonstrated that better RN to patient ratios mean reduced readmission rates between 15 and 30 days after hospital discharge. From the study published in the British Medical Journal of Quality & Safety : " Each one patient increase in a hospital's average paediatric staffing ratio increased a medical child's odds of readmission within 15–30 days by a factor of 1.11, or by 11% (95% CI 1.02 to 1.20) and a surgical child's likelihood of readmission within 15–30 days by a factor of 1.48, or by 48% (95% CI 1.27 to 1.73). Children treated in hospitals with paediatric staffing ratios of 1 : 4 or less were significantly less likely to be readmitted within 15–30 days. There were no significant effects of nurse staffing ratios on readmissions within 14 days." Weaknesses of the study include that it does draw from a dataset of nurse survey responses from four US s...