| Summary: | Abstract Aim Quantifying the relation between patient characteristics and care time and explaining differences in nursing time between wards. Design Academic hospital in the Netherlands. Six surgical wards, capacity 15–30 beds, 2012–2014. Methods Linear mixed effects model to study the relation between patient characteristics and care time. Estimated marginal means to estimate baseline care time and differences between wards. Results Nine patient characteristics significantly related to care time. Most required between 18 and 35 min extra, except “two or more IV/drip/drain” (8) and “one‐on‐one care” (156). Care time for minimum patient profile: 44–57 min and for average patient profile: 75–88 min. Sources of variation: nurse proficiency, patients, day‐to‐day variation within patients. The set of characteristics is short, simple and useful for planning and comparing workload. Explained variance up to 36%. Calculating estimated means per ward has not been done before. Nurse proficiency is an important factor.
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