Hospital records, from a nurse’s perspective.
Public hospital records, examined by a nurse and available for anyone to check.
Have hospitals recovered from the pandemic?
Have California hospitals returned to their pre-pandemic baseline?
Answering that meant checking nursing hours, contract staffing, and how many licensed beds hospitals reported having the staff to operate.
Those records cover different parts of hospital operations. CNO compares them with their reporting dates and definitions attached.
A weather report for the hospital.
A weather forecast does not rely on temperature alone. It considers wind, pressure, visibility, and changing conditions together. The Observatory takes the same approach to publicly reported hospital data.
CNO shows nursing hours, contract staffing, staffed beds, patient demand, and ED pressure together, with gaps marked UNKNOWN. Nurses can use those records to assess a job offer and ask specific questions about working conditions.
Explore California hospitals →Y. · Registered nurse
Y. is a registered nurse and the founder of the California Nursing Observatory. Her 26 years in nursing span bedside care, nursing education, perinatal quality review, mortality review, and public-health complaint review.
During the pandemic, she deployed to long-term-care facilities, including skilled nursing and assisted living. Those experiences inform her attention to what a facility can actually sustain, alongside what it reports.
Her work connects public data with the conditions nurses encounter in practice. A staffed bed depends on a nurse who can safely care for the patient in it. A new graduate depends on an experienced preceptor. A declining number can represent a colleague who left, an education department that disappeared, or another unit trying to make do with less.
The Observatory is independent, free to use, and unaffiliated with any hospital, health system, union, or nursing school.
Essays and investigations
Observations examines staffing, nurse education, service losses, and public data through records and nursing experience.
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