Toward ensuring care quality and safety across settings: examining time pressure in a nursing home with observational time motion study metrics based on the Omaha system.

Background: Meaningful data to determine safe and efficient nursing workload are needed. Reasoning a nurse can accomplish a finite number of interventions and location changes per hour, examination of time pressure using time motion study (TMS) methods will provide a comparable indication of safe and efficient workload for an individual nurse.

Methods: An observer shadowed 11 nurses at a 250-bed nursing home in the Southeastern United States and recorded 160 h of observations using TimeCaT, web-based TMS data recording software.