Measuring patient acuity and nursing care needs in South Korea: application of a new patient classification system.

BACKGROUND: An accurate and reliable patient classification system (PCS) can help inform decisions regarding adequate assignments for nurse staffing. This study aimed to evaluate the criterion validity of the Asan Patient Classification System (APCS), a new tertiary hospital-specific PCS, by comparing its rating and total scores with those of KPCS-1 and KPCS-GW for measuring patient activity and nursing needs. METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis of the medical records of 50,314 inpatients admitted to the general wards of a tertiary teaching hospital in Seoul, South Korea in March, June, September, and December 2019. Spearman's correlation and Kappa statistics according to quartiles were calculated to examine the criterion validity of the APCS compared with the KPCS-1 and KPCS-GW. RESULTS: The average patient classification score was 28.3 points for APCS, 25.7 points for KPCS-1, and 21.6 points for KPCS-GW. The kappa value between APCS and KPCS-1 was 0.91 (95% CI:0.9072, 0.9119) and that between APCS and KPCS-GW was 0.88 (95% CI:0.8757, 0.8810). Additionally, Spearman's correlation coefficients among APCS, KPCS-1, and KPCS-GW showed a very strong correlation. However, 10.8% of the participants' results were inconsistent, and KPCS-1 tended to classify patients into groups with lower nursing needs compared to APCS. CONCLUSION: This study showed that electronic health record-generated APCS can provide useful information on patients' severity and nursing activities to measure workload estimation. Additional research is needed to develop and implement a real-world EHR-based PCS system to accommodate for direct and indirect nursing care while considering diverse population and dynamic healthcare system.

[A study on health-related quality of life, smoking knowledge, smoking attitude, and smoking cessation intention in male smokers].

PURPOSE: This study was conducted to examine the relationship among health-related quality of life, smoking knowledge, smoking attitude, and smoking cessation intention in male smokers. METHOD: The subjects were 259 male smokers in J city. The data was collected using structured questionnaires from Nov. to Dec. of 2003. The data was analyzed by the SPSS (ver.10.0) computer program, and it included descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, the Pearson correlation coefficient, and Stepwise Multiple Regression. RESULT: The smoking cessation intention had a significant positive correlation among health-related quality of life (r=.159), smoking knowledge (r=.161), and smoking attitude (r=.127). These variables account for 26.8% of smoking cessation intention. CONCLUSION: These results suggested that the smoking cessation program to enhance the health-related quality of life, smoking knowledge, and smoking cessation intention and to increase a negative influence on smoking attitude need to be developed. Therefore, these findings give useful information for constructing a smoking cessation program in male smokers.