Introduction Staffing is a term that refers to the management of employee schedules.

For many retail businesses, staffing is monitored hourly because the cost of employee paychecks is a significant cost driver for the organization. For example, if you own a store and "staff" or schedule five employees to work between the hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at $10 per hour, you would be spending $500 on payroll. If the store sells $300 of merchandise per day, they'd be losing money by staffing 5 people to work each day for ten hours each. Rather, they would need to reduce their workforce down to 2 people to ensure they aren't spending more money on payroll (otherwise known as labor cost) than what they're making in sales (which is essentially how profit is derived). Note: this is a much different question than "what is staffing management." Staffing management customarily refers to companies that manage temp agencies. These are companies people call if they need to hire an employee part time or for a temporary assignment. Procedure PICANet collected data from 31 institutions providing paediatric intensive care. They looked at details of over 55,000 admissions to these units of nearly 39,000 individualchildren aged between 0 and 15 years over a three year period from 2009 to 2011. This included where each child was admitted, their diagnosis and the treatment they received, how long they remained in intensive care and the eventual outcome. Result/Findings The report showed that the death rate in paediatric intensive care units is continuing to fall, dropping from 4.2% in 2009 to 3.9% in 2011. However, a repeat analysis of more recent data from admissions in England and Wales between 2008 and 2011 showed that risk-adjusted mortality for children of south Asian origin was 40% higher than for other children admitted to paediatric intensive care, a slight increase since the first analysis was published in 2007. The death rate in English and Welsh paediatric intensive care units was 6.3% for south Asian children vs.4.0% in the rest of the children during this later period. Conclusion A snap-shot survey of staffing levels across the institutions also highlighted the mismatch between standards set by the Paediatric Intensive Care Society and the situation on the ground. Only 15% of institutions met the recommended ratio of nursing staff to childrens intensive care beds, despite overall staffing levels remaining the same. Reaction While I agree with that many nurses still provide excellent care while on short-staffed wards, the point of the article is care in general would improve if nurses weren't so overstretched. The fact is we are failing older people in reports, regardless of whether or not we are polite and caring because we just can't be everywhere at once. If you have a couple of seriously ill or difficult patients that require monitoring it's very easy to not give the nice lady in bed 5 all the time she needs, and deserves, because you're too busy, and she doesn't want to bother you because of that.