How to Improve Your Nurses’ Station: 5 Best Practices

Nurses’ stations are often core elements of healthcare environments, functioning as communication hubs and clinician and administrative staff workspaces. Improving your facility’s nursing workstation can have ripple effects on nurse job satisfaction, cooperation among multidisciplinary teams, compliance efforts, and even the patient journey.

Strategic changes or upgrades should be based on facilitation of the key tasks that take place there, with a priority placed on patient care efforts. We’ll discuss how these critical workspaces affect multiple aspects of care delivery at your facility. We’ll also provide five practical ways to improve your unit’s station for productivity, efficiency, and better patient outcomes.

What Is a Nurse Station?

A nurse workstation is a designated workspace where nurses and other healthcare staff can complete tasks that don’t require presence at the patient’s bedside. Stations may be centralized, de-centralized, or a hybrid of both (a central area with outlying substations). Tasks completed here typically fall within the following key categories:

• Communication
• Documentation
• Monitoring

The Purpose of Nursing Stations

The nurses’ workstation facilitates discussions among members of the care team, including physicians, physical therapists, nutritionists, and ancillary staff. It also allows nurses to complete daily work tasks, such as charting, creating care plans, and placing phone calls.

Nurse stations are often a primary place for interactions with patients and visitors. They may serve as a monitoring hub for specific metrics (such as heart rate, on a telemetry unit), unit/floor entrance points and corridors, and perhaps even specific patient rooms.

Who Should Have Access to the Nursing Station?

Many central nursing workspaces feature an open-concept design with two distinct areas: in front of the counter and behind the counter. This model allows for an open exchange of information over the counter and creates a welcoming environment, while maintaining restricted access to private patient health information.

The behind-the-counter area is reserved for certain roles on the care team. Depending on the size of the interior space, it could be limited to a specific hierarchy of providers, such as nurses, physicians, and unit secretaries only.

What Should Be in a Nurse’s Workstation

The nurse station should have the tools needed for completion of indirect care and non-clinical nursing activities. Federal, state, and facility-specific guidelines offer parameters for items that can be in this workspace.

The specific items in this workspace will vary by facility type. Here are the elements in a typical nurses’ station in a hospital:

• File cabinets and wall-mounted cabinets
• Rotary filing system or binder carousel (for paper charts)
• Handwashing station
• Pneumatic tube station
• Patient monitors and/or facility-wide monitors
• Computers
• Work surfaces and chairs
• Information related to nurse workflow (i.e., policies, medical reference charts)
• Telephones
• Trash receptacles and paper shredder
• Fire extinguisher

What Shouldn’t Be in a Nurse’s Workstation

It’s best practice for these spaces to be free of food, beverages, personal items, medical supplies, and medications. Distinct rooms, such as staff break rooms, medicine rooms, and supply closets, should be utilized for these items.

If you’re unsure whether an item belongs at this workspace, you may want to research relevant guidelines presented by oversight agencies to ensure your facility maintains compliance. Look into regulations regarding:

• Infection prevention and control
• Fire safety
• HIPAA
• Medication management and safety

5 Practical Ways to Improve the Nurses’ Station at Your Facility

Because the nursing workstation is a focal point for activity, it’s important to optimize its functionality. Improving this workspace can be done on any budget, and even small efforts could have a significant impact on the wellbeing of your nursing staff and the care they provide to patients. Here are five steps you can take today to enhance this space.

1. Eliminate Visual Clutter at the Nursing Station to Reduce Cognitive Load

Though it’s tempting to tape or tack up every relevant oxygen vendor list, falls protocol update, and facility staff directory to the walls and cabinets, all this visual information creates a sense of chaos. Limit visual information to strict necessities, and organize other information so that it’s easily accessible.

A clean look will reflect well on your organization when your clients approach the station for information. Minimizing visual distractions and creating a clear and aesthetically pleasing space can also lower your nursing staff’s cognitive load, so that they have mental energy needed for clinical decision making.

2. Create Multiple Lines of Sight to Relevant Patient Monitors

If you have wall- or counter-mounted monitors, ensure that they can be seen from as many positions within the station as possible. This allows nurses working on other tasks to easily look up to check on the nature of an auditory alert.

In nursing, it’s impossible to eliminate multitasking. However, considering workflow in strategic ways can minimize the disruption of taking care of multiple tasks at once.

3. Provide Clear Surfaces to Promote Communication Between Members of the Healthcare Team

Communication between multidisciplinary team members is crucial to optimal patient care. Encourage conversations and the exchange of information by providing inviting, clean shared workspaces where two or more clinicians can gather and talk.

4. Create Designated Activity Zones Within the Nurse Workstation

To improve the flow of traffic, create distinct zones for the different tasks. In a hospital, nursing stations may need to send and receive lab specimens, for example. Providing a designated space for this task not only allows for proper infection control practices, but also prevents congestion in other areas of the station.

The nurses’ station design at your facility is unique, and it may help to observe the workflow within it to understand where the bottlenecks are. Do physicians tend to use certain computers after rounds? Are patient charts too close to a handwashing station? Observe for a few days before making strategic changes. Signs, floor tape, rearranging furniture, or a simple communication with your nursing team could emphasize the updated zones.

5. Balance Accessibility With Privacy of Patient Health information

Because the nurses’ workspace serves as a communication hub, it should be accessible to anyone who enters the unit. This is often done with a counter that visitors can approach. However, when visitors, patients, and ancillary staff approach to ask questions or chat, it is important that they can’t see restricted health information. Angle computer monitors in such a way that screens aren’t visible to visitors, and arrange charting areas to promote privacy of health information.

Learn More Ways to Enhance Your Patient Care Delivery

Strategically optimizing your nursing station is one great way to create a welcoming and safe environment at your facility. Get more nursing leadership insights and guidance from our team of experts.