Abstract
The Nursing Division of the Japanese Society of Intensive Care Medicine has conducted a national survey to obtain data on nursing in ICUs. A 31-item questionnaire was generated by the standing committee members and local chapter representatives and was sent to 1,188 hospitals. Four hundred and eighty-one ICUs from 471 hospitals replied. The mode of the number of ICU beds was 6. The proportion of ICU beds to all hospital beds was 1.8%. The median number of annual ICU admissions was 1,220 patients, and the median number of average length of stay was 4.4 days. Three-quarters of the ICUs were general ICUs, and most of the medical directors were affiliated with anesthesiology. Health care professionals other than critical care nurses or physicians were employed in one-quarter of the surveyed ICUs, but less than 10% of the ICUs employed these personnel in round-the-clock shifts. New graduate nurses were assigned to two-thirds of the ICUs. New employee nurses accounted for 25% of the nurses in the ICU annually. The annual turnover rate was 10%. The nurse-patient ratio was 1:2 or less in more than 80% of the ICUs on weekdays and nights. The results of the questionnaire implied a need of more accurate statistics of length of ICU stay, development of reliable ICU database, and determination of acceptable proportion of new employed nurses.
