Consider the following scenario.

In Florida, Clara, an active ninety-four-year-old great-grandmother who still worked as a hospital volunteer two days a week, was admitted to the hospital for a bowel obstruction. She and her family, along with nurses from the hospital, said that there were too few nurses to check her during the night when her eldest son went home to sleep for a couple of hours. Clara called the nurses to help her use the bathroom but when no one came, she climbed over the bed railing. Still groggy from surgery twenty hours earlier, Clara fell to the floor and broke her left hip. She died two days later during surgery to repair the hip fracture. “It was just too much for her,” said her grandson. “For want of one nurse, she died” (Gibson and Singh 2003, 101).