Nursing workload of trauma victims: an integrative literature review

Trauma victims, due to the severity of the injuries,present a high demand for care during hospitalization. However, it is not clearin the literature the nursing workload measurement instruments used in thispopulation, nor the results found. In this context, the aim of this study is toinvestigate studies that analyze the nursing workload required by traumavictims according to the instrument applied and the results identified. It is aliterature review carried out in the Scopus, Medline, LILACS, SCIELO, and IBECSdatabase during October 2018. The studies inclusion criteria in this reviewwere: be available in full for free access and be an original article publishedin English, Portuguese or Spanish that exclusively addresses trauma victims.The following health descriptors were used to the search: nursing, workloadand wounds and injuries and the keyword trauma, combined withboolean operators “or” and “and”. As the result, eight studies were selected tothis review. The Nursing Activities Score (NAS) was the most applied nursingworkload measurement instrument, highlighting the results on the positiverelation between workload and severity of the victims. One study showed theimportance of preventing delirium in reducing the nursing workload. Duringchildren resuscitation, higher-level activations and events without previousnotification increased the demand of care of the nursing team. The analysisshowed that the most frequently performed nursing interventions in ICU traumavictims were: monitoring and titration, laboratory investigations, medicationapart from vasoactive drugs, hygiene procedures, mobilization and positioning,administrative and managerial tasks, and quantitative urine output measurement.The studies included in this review allowed to conclude that NAS was theinstrument of choice to measure the nursing workload required by trauma victimsand that more researches need to be done in different countries and thepossible relationship between care demand and aspects of trauma, including theseverity of the injuries/trauma, need to be better explored.