Nurse human reesource requirements are derived from requirements for health care services.  Health care services are produced from a mix of different human and non human resources.  The relationship between the levels and mix of resources used to produce health care services and the quantity and quality of services produced is the production function.  Changes in the methods of production over time can lead to changes in the relationship between the inputs used and the outputs produced leading to increases or decreases in the rate of production from a given level of resource inputs and hence a reduction in the cost of the product.  The production function approach focuses on the combinations of inputs that can be used to generate given levels of production rather than simply measuring the rates of input to output.  The focus is on the decisions that organizations make that affect production rather than the performance of nursing itself. Innovation is therefore important in the delivery of health care services in order to avoid continuous increases in the cost of services.  The preferred approach to evaluating such decisions would be to study the entire range of services used in an illness episode and analyze variations in the levels and mix of inputs across episodes.  However, as the data needed for such an approach cannot be linked or are simply unavailable, this analysis focuses on nursing services provided in acute hospitals.  While there is no reason to believe that changes in the rate of nursing outputs observed in the hospital sector will be the same as in the other sectors, the research provides a methodology for exploring changes in the rates of output in these other sectors as more information on these sectors becomes available.  

See more of Health Human Resource Modeling: Challenging the Past, Creating the Future
See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)