The Importance Of Appropriate Staffing

Staffing is the process of ensuring that adequate numbers and appropriate personnel are available to meet the daily unit’s needs and organizational goals.
It can also be defined as a process of ensuring and assigning the right personnel with the right with the right qualification to a job at the right time to ensure that the organizational goals are met.
Appropriate staffing is one factor which affects patient care greatly. Any deficit in level of staffing poses a negative effect on the health care system.
The nursing profession over time have been greatly affected by nursing shortage whereby the number of nursing staff available are not enough to render the adequate care which the patient requires.
We must agree that the nursing staff are

PATIENT FACTOR: - Some reason for ineffective staffing result due to some patient factor such as the patient type i.e. the diagnosis of the patient, the age of the patient or the sex of the patient. It could be due to the complexity of care been rendered to the patient e.g. semi-conscious patient or a deeply unconscious patient will be demanding more care than a patient who is fully conscious. The duration a patient spends in the hospital also have a major role in affecting effective staffing in allocating staff in the ward, the head nurse have to check the type of patient in the ward. There are times when one patient will seem like eight patient because of the condition of the patient. The patient will require complete care and this will necessitate more number of staff on duty. Example, if there is a patient bleeding profusely and another patient having difficulty with breathing and still there are two or more patient who were just wheeled from the theatre. If the number of staff on duty are three and the total patient in the ward is twenty four, it will be very difficult for the staff to cope and this will be seen as inadequate staffing. On the other hand, if the patients are stable and do not require complex care, the three nurses will cope with caring with the twenty four patients. Also, in allocating staffs, we have to look into those units the patient requires complex care like the emergency

The right staffs needs to be in the right job so that the number of staff available will be adequate. If for instance there is inadequate number of staff in the nursing department and the organization employed more accountants, you will find out that those accountants cannot work in the nursing department hence there will still be shortage of nurses. If organization actually want to tackle the problem of inadequate staffing, then they will need to recruit the right people for each job or department.
3. ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR: - This factor have to do with the organization. The structure of the organization can affect staffing in the sense that the number of staffs in private facilities is not same with those of government. Small facilities and some me big facilities. The smaller facilities always have problem with staffing. The facilities are not able in most cases to fund the bill of too much staffs, hence they only employ few people whom they will be able to pay. The bigger facilities on the other hands employ more staffs to care for the organizational