CCPR Affiliate Chandni Raja’s Paper on Hospital Nurse Staffing Ratios Published in the Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 92

CCPR Affiliate Chandni Raja recently published her paper, “How do hospitals respond to input regulation? Evidence from the California nurse staffing mandate,” in the Journal of Health Economics, Vol 92. This paper identifies and estimates the effects of minimum staffing ratios on hospitals’ input use, output, capacity, and quality of care. Findings indicate that hospitals responded to minimum nurse-to-patient ratios on several margins: increased their use of lower-licensed and younger nurses, reduced capacity by 16 beds (14 percent), and increased bed utilization rates by 0.045 points (8 percent).

In addition, findings from administrative data on discharges for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) indicate a significant reduction in length of stay per patient (5 percent) and no effect on the 30-day all-cause readmission rate. The null effect on readmissions suggests that length of stay declined not because hospitals were discharging AMI patients “quicker and sicker”, rather, AMI patients recovered more quickly due to an improvement in care quality per day.

To learn more about the study, please click on the link to the paper here.