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More handpicked essays just for you.
Nursing accountability
The importance of nurse accountability
The importance of nurse accountability
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One Nurse, One Shift Shifting Perspectives In the nonfiction book The Shift registered nurse, Theresa Brown starts her story with “I'm hiding under the covers: Im afraid. Afraid of that moment when the rock slips and all hell breaks loose. For me, it was the patient who started coughing up blood and within five minutes was dead, just like that.” This is Brown describing some of the struggles she encounters on a typical shift as a nurse.
Management of Care Case Study Josepha is working on a medical surgical unit with three other RNs and one LPN. There is also a male and a female patient care tech. Josepha has been a nurse for four months, and after completing two months of orientation she takes a full assignment as a registered nurse. Josepha feels that the assignments she receives are not always fair, as she tends to get the most challenging clients.
The idea of shift work is a common one, but for nurses this is not a simple changing of staff during a certain time, change of shift signifies a time of purposeful communication between nurses and patients, in order to promote patient safety and best practices (Caruso, 2007). During this time, there is the possibility for this critical opportunity to relay important information to become disorganized by extraneous information, rather than concentrating on the needs of the patient (Sullivan, 2010). Often the patient is left out of the conversation, and is not a part of the process. Patients and families can play an important role in making sure these transitions in care are safe and effective (AHRQ, 2013).
Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse) is the head nurse of the ward, or the combine as Bromden calls it, and she runs and directs the institution. She is very powerful and demanding – the ward only functions in the way she sees fit. Ratched will often dominate over the patients and other ward staff, even the doctor on staff. She also exposes the ward patients to electro-shock therapy if they disobey her orders. Like a massive obstacle, the Big Nurse proves to assert her power over all the patients and seems to care more about the functionality of the ward rather than her patient’s humanity.
In response to hospitals being under staffed with nurses, Theresa Brown argues that hospitals must have a sufficiently large nursing staff in her article “When No One Is on Call”. She effectively builds her argument by using personal anecdotes and statistics. Brown begins the speech by recalling a personal story when she was in nursing school with understaffed busy nurses. A patient needed their pain medicine dose adjusted, the patient’s pain subsided, but the patient experienced shortness of breath and low oxygen levels. Brown informed the patient’s nurse that the patient needed narcan to reverse the impact from the pain medicine.
During the extended hospital stay, the cost of treatment also increases, sometimes by about 61 percent of the normal charges for treatment (Guse et al., 2015). Evidence based practice has shown evidence that hourly rounding can decrease the general hospital stay significant while at the same time cutting down the cost of treatment through reduction of falls. Nurses against this change complain of increased commitment on other duties, making it difficult for them to attend to their patients within the hour (Marquis & Huston, 2015). It should, however, be understood that hourly rounding may never be successful without teamwork. The absence of one nurse during the hourly rounding should be substituted by another nurse without regular complaints about personal patients.
Literature shows that there are paybacks in transporting out bedside handover, it proposes that bedside handover helps to put up associations amid nurses and patients’ and it also amplified patient’s satisfaction. The literature nepotism bedside reporting as it; thwart nurse’s from typecasting patient’s and averts them from manufacturing judgemental explanation that can give erstwhile nurses a pessimistic attitude (Parker et al, 1992). Among all the varieties of nursing handover, bedside handover is the mainly time-efficient process (Webster, 1999) it endorses patient contribution (Walsh and Ford,
Moreover, several studies have been conducted to examine the effects of low nurse staffing on patients hospitalization experiences, as well as its effect on nurse careers in the long run. A recent study by Frith, Anderson, Tseng, and Fong (2012) to explore the relationship between nurse staffing and medication errors, demonstrated that medication errors were higher in a cardiac care unit and non-cardiac care unit when staffing levels were lower. In addition, Frith et al. (2012) pointed out that medication errors increase by 18% for every 20% decrease in nurse staffing below the average due to failure to follow medication administration protocol As mentioned earlier, nurses perform the last and the most important step of medication administration. Thus, having adequate time to assess each patient efficiently and following the medication rights is critical to provide safe patient care and prevent errors.
Short staffing is one of the many challenges nurses encounter in the work environment. The impacts can be detrimental primarily to the patient’s outcome. To examine the effects of short staffing, research was conducted on 36,539 hospital inpatients to evaluate the amount of those exposed to an understaffed shift and how many patient outcomes resulted in a NSO (Twigg, Gelder, & Myers, 2015). NSO’s are nurse sensitive outcomes based on the nursing care provided to the patient. Patients exposed to short staffing had an increase of greater than one chance of NSO’s compared to patients not exposed (Twigg et al., 2015).
Nurses play an essential role in the healthcare industry. The nurse workforce is made up of licensed nurses: registered nurses (RNs), licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs), along with nurse aides. Registered nurses are responsible for assessments of patients’ needs, development of care plans, medication administration, and treatments, while licensed vocational nurses perform specific care under the delegation of the registered nurses and supervisions. Nursing aides perform activities of daily living (unskilled attention) to the patient. Adequate nursing staffing is essential to both patient care and outcomes, also to the retention of nurses while inadequate staffing creates problems for both the patients and
Case study of Mrs. A thought her admission to a acute ward, demonstrated the skills that are needed to care for her. 21312829 This assignment is a case study looking at a patient who has been admitted to an acute hospital following a fall. It will look at why the patient has been admitted and what skills are needed to deliver appropriate care.
I agree with you Walter. Nursing is a teamwork. In an acute hospital setting, an RN is assigned a set of patient to deliver care that means RN has full responsibility about these patients. In this case, RN who is the primary care nurse can complete her task by herself or delegate some of the task to the nursing assistant according to their scope of practice. The abilities to delegate, and supervise other healthcare workers is not an easy job.
This is important evidence because it gives us conditions and results of what can happen if patients get lower quality care. Patients’ are not having enough time getting checked up by a nurse, and nurses would miss some diagnostics. Patients are getting sick because of the poor care they are receiving from nurses. The care patients can get is affected by a nurse shortage, “Nursing workload definitely affects the time that a nurse can allot to various tasks. Under a heavy workload, nurses may not have sufficient time to perform tasks that can have a direct effect on patient safety.
Nurses need to be at workplaces on time. being late might interrupt the curing process. Lack of discipline in the medical field will affect patients ' care. Nurses not only need to be disciplined, but also they need to have integrity. Integrity: Nurses should be honest and trustworthy in their actions.
They need to be cognizant of not only their mistakes, but the mistakes of those making the decisions before them. Therefore, nurses should not be constantly asked to work overtime because that is how mistakes are missed or made (Kelley, 2004). Nurses should sharpen their saws between shifts and their days off, only then can they perform their absolute