Jinhyun Kim
Seoul National University College of Nursing, Korea
Title: Economic Effect of Nurse Staffing Policy Reform on Hiring Hospital
Biography
Biography: Jinhyun Kim
Abstract
Nurse shortage in hospitals has been a significant policy issue related to patient safety and family’s economic burden of caregivers of inpatients in Korea. In line with this, the Korean government introduced nurse staffing policy reform to improve the ratio of nurse to patient in general ward from less than 14~16 to above 8~12. It is optional for hospitals to join in the new nurse staffing scheme, and for hospitals fufilled with required staffing level, a 130% of total labor cost is reimbursed by the national health insurance. This paper analysed the economic effect of the reform on nurse employment in hospital industry. An input-output interindustry model was used to estimate the direct and indirect effects of the new policy on hiring nurses and data was collected from the national health insurance claims database. A total of 26,381 beds in hospitals joined in the new scheme and 12,381 registered nurses(RNs) and 6,194 assistant nurses(ANs) were hired, for which the insurance reimbursed 646.35 million dollars in the year of 2017. The job creation effect for RNs and ANs was estimated to be 74.7 persons including 28.7 persons directly and 46.0 persons indirectly per one million dollars’ expenditure. Compared with an average of 20.2 persons in total industry and 26.6 persons in health care industry per per one million dollars’ expenditure, the new nurse staffing policy showed a job creation effect of as high as 281%~370%. The government is expected to support and extend the policy based on the performance.
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2016R1A2B4015298)