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Nurse staffing on inpatient psychiatric units was examined using data from a national sample of 409 hospitals. Hospitals' nonpsychiatric unit staffing predicted psychiatric unit staffing, accounting for 15.2% and 6.8% of variability in licensed and unlicensed staffing, respectively. Licensed and unlicensed staffing on psychiatric units were inversely related. Of the non-California hospitals in the study, 70% had annual levels of psychiatric unit staffing exceeding California's mandated 1:6 licensed staffing ratio.

In 2012, the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators launched a project to expand its falls indicator for use on pediatric, neonatal, and psychiatric units. We discuss challenges encountered, argue that schemes for categorizing falls by cause or supposed preventability are not suitable for large-scale efforts to track and prevent falls, express concern about the growing burden of collecting increasingly granular quality data, and discuss limitations of total and injurious fall rates as quality measures.

Hierarchical Poisson modeling was used to explore hospital and nursing unit characteristics as predictors of the unassisted fall rate. Longitudinal data were collected from 1502 units in 248 US hospitals. The relation between the fall rate and total nurse staffing was positive at lower staffing levels and negative for levels around and above the median. The fall rate was negatively associated with registered nurse skill mix and average registered nurse tenure on the unit.