FAQs: Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator

To report the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator, facilities must be enrolled in NHSN and have elected to follow the Patient Safety Component.

• If you are uncertain about your facility’s NHSN enrollment status, your facility’s infection prevention staff are a great resource for this information.
• Using the facility’s Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services number (CCN), enrollment status can be checked at https://nhsn.cdc.gov/AMIE/.
• If you are still unsure about your facility’s NHSN enrollment status, contact NHSN@cdc.gov with “NHSN Enrollment Status” in the subject line. Include the facility’s name, address, and CCN in the email.

Yes, any facility that is eligible to enroll in the Patient Safety Component may report the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator. The facility must have a critical care unit/location as one of their active locations within the NHSN application.

Facilities may report all their critical units that have been mapped in NHSN. This includes pediatric critical units as well as neonatal critical care units.

If a facility elects to report the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator, all critical care units/locations which are in active status within the NHSN application must be reported. 

The protocol and training materials can be found on the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator webpage at https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/psc/nshi/index.html.

Facility enrollment information can be found at https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/enrollment/index.html.

Yes, the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator data must be entered into the NHSN application.

Each facility must decide the appropriate workflow for reporting the Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator. The NHSN Facility Administrator within your facility may add additional users to report these data. We recommend that facilities discuss this internally so individuals can complete the necessary steps to access the NHSN application.

The data elements for the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator are similar to those reported to NDNQI and are based on measures stewarded by the American Nurses Association, which are endorsed by a consensus-based entity.

• #0204 – Skill mix (Registered Nurse [RN], Licensed Vocational/Practical Nurse [LVN/LPN], unlicensed assistive personnel [UAP], and contract)
• #0205 – Nursing Hours per Patient Day

Nursing staff in the categories of RN, LPN/LVN and UAP working more than 50% of the shift and providing direct patient care on a critical care unit mapped to NHSN are eligible to be counted, regardless of employment classifications (such as full-time, part-time, PRN, contract, staff pulled from another unit).

The NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator are reported as a monthly total for each nurse staffing role: registered nurses (RNs), licensed vocational/practical nurses (LVN/LPN) and unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP).

Additional units/locations will be added in the future, but a timeframe has not yet been determined.

At this time, reporting NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator will be voluntary. Users will be notified in advance of any changes.

Currently, there are no sample reports. Available metrics include Total Nurse Staffing Hours per Patient Day, and Nurse Staffing Hours separated for each nursing category (RN, LPN/LVN, UAP), as well as Percentage of Productive Hours Worked by RNs, LPN/LVNs, and UAPs.

As adequate NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours data become available, NHSN anticipates evaluating these data alongside HAI data. Facilities entering these data are encouraged to perform analysis of these data at the facility-, CDC location code-, location-, and location type-levels. Overtime, facilities can use these data to monitor for trends and track the impact of prevention strategies.

NHSN intends to assess any associations between nurse staffing metrics and HAI incidence rates when sufficient reporting exists. Furthermore, these new metrics will be included together with other potential explanatory factors when assessing them for independent association with HAI incidence rates. Descriptive analyses will be performed on these metrics and NHSN will provide reports that help facilities characterize the distributions of these metrics across the various patient care locations from which they are reported within each facility.

The NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours data may be entered manually. The .CSV upload option will be available after October 21, 2023.

The data elements for the NHSN Nurse Staffing Hours Indicator are total direct care hours for each of the nurse staffing roles – registered nurses (RNs), licensed vocational/practical nurses (LVN/LPN) and unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP), as well as total patient day counts. All data elements should be reported from the same critical care unit/location.