RESULTS
AHA and OSHPD Data on Aggregate Hospital Staffing
AHA reports full-time-equivalent employment of RNs and LPNs, while OSHPD reports productive hours. We computed FTEE for the OSHPD data using the formula above. As seen in Figure 1, there is a difference in the distribution of total RN FTEs in each dataset; the difference in the means is not statistically significant, with the AHA data producing slightly lower average RN FTEs than the OSHPD data (231.4 versus 234.9, p=.47). The Pearson and Spearman correlations between RN staffing in these datasets were quite high, with both at 0.93. Thus, the AHA and OSHPD data provide similar measures of RN staffing, once the OSHPD data have been converted to FTEs. There is less concordance between the AHA and OSHPD data in the measurement of LPN staffing. The mean LPN FTEs in the AHA data are higher than in the OSHPD data (28.6 versus 27.0, p=.16). The Pearson correlation between these datasets is 0.69.