Baccalaureate nurses and hospital outcomes: more evidence.

HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH IMPACTS DEBATE In a highly controversial decision in 1965, the American Nurses Association called for the baccalaureate degree in nursing (BSN) to be required for licensure of professional nurses by 1985. However, hospital diploma education—the pathway to nursing for most students in 1965—gave way not to bachelor’s education but largely to associate degree education, fueled by public subsidies to community colleges. Meanwhile, many other countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Philippines, and many in South America, standardized entry into professional nursing at the baccalaureate level. In the United States, where physicians have the most years of education of any country in the world, nursing education pathways remain varied and confusing to prospective nurses, employers, and consumers alike, and two thirds of new RNs still enter practice with less than a baccalaureate degree. However, a decade of health services research showing better patient outcomes associated with better educated nurses has had a remarkable impact on employer preferences for nurses with baccalaureate qualifications, the return of 100,000 RNs to school to obtain BSNs, and may well be the catalyst for achieving in the future a largely bachelor’s educated nurse workforce in the United States after decades of debate. The breakthrough in health services research came with the reconceptualization of nurses’ education as a modifiable property of a health care organization, much like the Institute of Medicine’s redefinition of patient safety as a property of an organization. In both cases, new definitions served as catalysts for action on old problems by putting the onus on health care organizations to respond. The initial paper defining BSN education as a modifiable property of hospitals was a study of outcomes following general surgery in 168 Pennsylvania hospitals in 1999. Each 10% increase in the proportion of BSN staff nurses was associated with 5% lower odds on death and failure to rescue after taking into account how sick the patients were and other characteristics of hospitals that had been shown to be associated with mortality rates, including physician qualifications. A front page story about these findings in the Newark Star Ledger published the names of major New Jersey hospitals linked to the proportion of their bedside nurses who were bachelor’s qualified, an illustration of the action potential for changing practice by engaging employers for the first time in a meaningful way. The American Organization of Nurse Executives, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association, issued a historic statement not long after the publication and extensive media coverage of the paper supporting the BSN as the desired credential for hospital nurses. From a methodological perspective, nurses’ education as an organizational property, operationalized as the percentage of bedside care nurses with BSNs or higher, was a reasonably straightforward dashboard measure that could be monitored by individual organizations and included in large-scale studies of hospital performance. Other studies followed, replicating and expanding the evidence of an association between BSN qualifications and better patient outcomes. Replications in other countries