The credibility and usefulness of the RAFAELA
system was tested in 14 Finnish hospitals between
2000 and 2002 with good results (Fagerström
and Rauhala 2003). After this initial testing, the
Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities
took ownership of the system, while the Finnish
Consulting Group Ltd is charged with overseeing the
license system, quality assurance and staff education
(Fagerström and Rauhala 2003, 2007). More than 90%
of Finnish hospitals have implemented this system,
and the process has been underway in Iceland since
2010, Norway since 2011, and the Netherlands,
Sweden and Vietnam since last year.
Benefits
The RAFAELA system is a tool that can be integrated
into an organisation’s management and patient
administrative systems. The system uses data on
patients’ care needs and nurses’ workload, and
provides an effective platform for the management
of nursing resources, operatively and strategically.
It enables efficient allocation of nursing resources
over time in accordance with patients’ real care
needs; it also has a positive effect on nurses’ clinical
practice and therefore influences patient outcomes.
Once the system is integrated into a unit – with
nurses classifying every patient each calendar day
and performing daily registration of available nursing
resources – the system provides information in
four main domains: patients’ need for individual care,
nurses’ workload, nursing staff costs, and productivity
of nursing staff (Fagerström and Rauhala 2007).
With the system it is possible to:
■■ Improve person-centred care for patients, by
starting with the care needs of each individual.
■■ Improve workforce planning and decrease
staff costs, for example through effective
allocation of available resources and reducing
the need for deputy, or assistant, nurses, acute
replacements or permanent reserves. The system
also provides information for budget planning
and cost calculation.
■■ Improve quality and manage risks better, by
taking patients’ individual care needs, not just
their number and diagnoses, into account.
Optimal workload per nurse reduces the
incidences of mistakes and adverse events
and so improves safety.
■■ Increase nurses’ job satisfaction and decrease
the amount of sick leave taken, by allocating
resources optimally to create a better balanced
and more equally distributed workload.
■■ Enhance patient documentation, by having daily
and systematic classifications based on nurses’
experiences and the nursing documentation
recorded in each patient’s record. Better
documentation gives a more reliable
classification of NI.
The RAFAELA system provides different kinds
of information, in the form of reports that can be
used for various purposes by staff nurses, nurse
managers at various levels and politicians. Below
are examples of how nurse managers can use
the information derived from the system when
developing person-centred care and in evidencebased
human resource management.
Figure 3 shows an example of a RAFAELA system
report of patients’ need for care and the associated
NI, measured using OPCq. The report shows the
average NI points for two patient groups, those
with cerebral infarction (Diagnosis Related Group
(DRG) 14) and those with rhythmic cardiac disease
(DRG 139) during one year. Figure 3 shows that
patients with cerebral infarction require on average
a higher NI than those with rhythmic cardiac
disease. The data were measured using the OPCq
instrument, which measures domains not commonly
calculated by other instruments including planning
and co-ordination of care, teaching, guidance in care,
follow-up care, emotional support and relatives’
need for support and guidance.
The inclusion of the first domain in the OPCq
instrument has proved to be a wise decision;
traditionally, planning and co-ordination of care have
been categorised as indirect care but are deemed
prerequisites for efficient care pathways under this
system. For example, the average age of patients
with rhythmic cardiac disease is lower than that of
patients with cerebral infarction, and these patients
can usually take care of their hygiene once discharged