Nurse Patient Ratio

Nurses are trained and educated to provide critical care, and minimal care to their patients. However, no one with any amount of education or training can provide safe and effective care when given 10-30 patients per one nurse. Hospital nurses that work on critical care units and medical units, can have up to 10-30 patients, if understaffed. In this situation, nurses are more prone to medical errors in charting, giving wrong medication to patients, and unintentional neglect. It is impractical for mandated nurse to patient ratio laws to not be put in place for safe and effective patient care.

While patients are in the hospital their concern is to be safe and to be taken care of. When nurses are not able to provide that care due to too many patients to nurse ratio, a lot can go wrong. For example; if a nurse is caring for eight patients in a critical care unit and two patients go into cardiac arrest, the outcome will result in death for one of the two due to one nurse

Resulting in nurses having anxiety attacks, emotional outbursts, and taking their frustration out physically or verbally on patients. When a nurse is under that amount of pressure, and has to provide the upmost care to twenty patients, it is emotionally exhausting and may result in depression and feeling of inadequacy. Also, nurses are more prone to injuries while on duty when their patient load is heavy. Such as, when a patient needs a two person lift, she or he may try doing it alone due to lack of time or not sufficient staffing. However, when a nurse lifts a patient in an un-safe way, it could injury her or him and the patient. Overworked nurses often lead to quitting, the turnover rate in the nursing career is usually due from being burned out. Overall, an overworked and burned out nurse is a risk to themselves and the patient while giving care to an unimaginable patient