Budget Cut In Nursing Care Essay

There were many things that affected the QI to improve; one of the main things was the budget cut. The staff suffered many things one of them was that there was cuts in the nursing staff. “For example, in 2005 the nursing department was ordered to cut 100 full –time equivalent jobs (FTEs)” (Quigley et al, 2010) causing nurses to work longer hours. The staff also worked on their days off in order for the hospital not to be short on staff. This limited the nurses to work on QI incentives because of the work overload. “Beginning of mid-July (2005), new nursing assistants were introduced” (Quigley et al, 2010). The hospital had to recruit more help from volunteers to complete things such as surveys or patient calls. There still remained some problems which made the hospital pay even two months in advance nurses to fill in the gaps there were. There was a lot of switching in schedules at this time for the nurses. The budget cuts also affected the ancillary services. Nurses and staff spent more time on the phone with the supply companies. They would find ways to get the supplies themselves. This action caused nurses to spend less time with the patient and more time trying to get supplies. There were many consequences from all these

Twelve quarters of data (July 2003-June 2006) were analyzed for the hospital as a whole and for individual units so that the hospital could understand the trend and fluctuations in the hospital’s patient experience data. Overall, the analyzed data displayed trends of improvement related to the QI process. Surveys scores increased from 76% to 80%, although it wasn’t a huge increase, consistency of movement overtime in the correct direction was considered a success.” (Quigley et al,