Nursing personnel planning for rural hospitals in Burdwan District, West Bengal, India, using workload indicators of staffing needs.

Lack of appropriate human resources planning is an important factor in the inefficient use of the public health facilities. Workforce projections can be improved by using objective methods of staffing needs based on the workload and actual work undertaken by workers, a guideline developed by Peter J. Shipp in collaboration with WHO-Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN). A cross-sectional study was carried out to estimate the nursing stuff requirement for the rural hospitals and provide a quantitative description of imbalances, if there is any, in the allocation at the district level during 2011. The average WISN turns out to be 0.35 for entire district, which means only 35% of the required nurses is available or 65% understaffed. So, there is an urgent need for more allocations and deployment of staff so that workload can be tackled and evenly distributed among all nursing personnel.