Table 2.

Nursing characteristics in the study hospitals in six European countries

Nursing characteristics	Mean	SD	25th percentile	75th percentile
Skill mix (% professional nurses)	65.6%	9.8%	56.4%	74.1%
Total staffing	6.09	1.61	5.01	7.10
Practice environment	2.67	0.24	2.51	2.82
Nurse education (% bachelors)	46.8%	26.3%	26.9%	68.0%

Skill mix is the percentage of professional nurses among all nursing personnel in the hospital. Total staffing is the total number of all nursing personnel (at all qualification levels) for every 25 patients they cared for. The practice environment measure is the average score for each hospital across four subscales indicating (1) managerial support for nursing, (2) nurse participation in hospital affairs, (3) doctor-nurse relations and (4) promotion of care quality (where a score of 1 would indicate extremely poor on all subscales, and a score of 4 would indicate excellent on all subscales). Nurse education is the percentage of all professional nurses in each hospital with bachelor's degrees.