ABSTRACT
Background: The importance of the acute phase in hospitals has been increasing. While administering high-level critical care, the working styles of critical care nurses, the types of clinical care they provide, and the way in which they prioritize tasks, remain unclear. Aim of this study was to elucidate the characteristic duties of critical care nurses through a comparison with neurological ward nurses. Methods: We recorded the duties of critical care nurses and neurology ward nurses (10 each) using a time-study design. Duties were measured separately by action, classified using a classification table, and differences between the two groups were compared. Results: No differences in the number of actions were observed between the two groups. The top five items that required the most time for critical care nurses were, “Movement”, “Administration and oxygen management”, “Handover process/Doctor’s rounds”, “Preparation for entry and exit management of patients”, and “Bed bathing (for bedbound patients)”. Of the 195 items, significant differences between the groups were noted for 34 items, while the duties of critical care nurses were best characterized by bed bathing (for bedbound patients), changing position, confirmation of infusion tubes, handover process/doctor’s rounds, and preparation for entry and exit management of patients. Conclusion: A characteristic of critical care nurses is that they must remain near patients and perform tasks while moving only a short distance. Moreover, the promotion of tasks while communicating with physicians is presumed to play a role in the promotion of team medicine. Furthermore, much time was spent caring for patients in bed, and a lot of time was devoted to the preparation and finalizing of treatments and care, suggesting the possibility that more time can be spent on caring for patients through a revision of duties.