Part II
Resources For The Study
Overview
In the course of its deliberations the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on the Adequacy of Nurse Staffing in Hospitals and Nursing Homes relied on a variety of sources of information. Part II of this report is designed to make some of these resources available to the reader, specifically, a discussion of the study activities; statistical resources used by the committee members; and the background papers commissioned by the committee.
The study activities are described in that section of the report, which immediately follows this introduction, as well as in the introduction to Part I (Chapter 1). The statistical resources are data from the American Hospital Association's annual hospital surveys and its National Hospital Panel Surveys, and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Public Health Service, and other sources; these were used to better understand trends in the delivery of, and market for, acute care. Several chapters in the report benefited from these data. The commissioned papers provided scholarly background information on a range of issues for the committee's benefit.