Nursing Shortage Essay

Society heavily relies on the availability and knowledge that nurses supply. Quality and accessible healthcare are typically valued by most people, and that task commonly falls into the nursing sector. The frequent issue this presents is the need for a high volume of nurses, which is not currently being met. In the past few years, staff shortages hit the nursing occupation hard, particularly, due to the arrival of COVID-19. Working in a new environment filled with fear and anxiety, took a toll on millions of nurses, ultimately leading to many quitting. This left a smaller percentage of nurses, with hospitals being more packed than ever before. The remaining nurses were overworked, fatigued, and facing a lack of motivation to care for a large

Naturally, the more nurses that quit their job, the more assignments others have to fill. This results in current nurses taking on more undertakings than usual, along with extra long days to complete the work. The Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses lists four main reasons why nurses are experiencing high workloads: an increase in demand for nurses, an inadequate supply of nurses, reduced staffing and increased overtime, and a reduction in patient length of stay (Carayon et al). Factors such as these have become normalized in today’s healthcare. Nursing shortages are happening everywhere in the United States right now. Proper staffing needs to be instituted because a failure to do so, leads to higher rates of exploitation among the current nurses. A book titled Nursing Shortage explores this concept by conveying how hospitals with high patient-to-nurse ratios, have more nurses that experience burnout, dissatisfaction, and have patients that experience higher mortality and failure-to-rescue rates than facilities with lower patient-to-nurse ratios (Haddad et al). With nurses being held to such a high standard, fair compensation must be given back for the amount of time and energy they put into their job. Their profession itself is rigorous enough, so combining another individual's occupation into the mix is immense. Hospitals know

With that, there are still many medical centers that are lacking this necessary support that all healthcare employees should be receiving. After working through an entire global pandemic, nurses were feeling more burnt out than ever. Similar to every other hospital in the United States, Saint Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois, was overworking its slim amount of nurses. Their nurses were extremely fatigued and they did not issue any method of aid to help their nurses. Instead, the nurses were given the complete opposite: wage theft. This ranged from absent compensation for overtime, no raises, and absent paid time-off (Falcone). If all hospitals honestly understood what they put their nurses through, they would compensate and offer proper burnout resources. Misusing nurses is immorally wrong, but sadly this happens at many hospitals in the U.S. Nevertheless, disregarding nurses' needs happens outside of Saint Joseph’s Medical Center. A study done through Tarbiat Modares University found many hospitals faced a “lack of appropriate and adequate provision of resources and facilities” for their nurses when given intense workloads (Khademi et al). High nurse-to-patient ratios should be addressed accordingly instead of being ignored. The patient is at risk as well as the nurses. Not to mention, these are hospitals: healthcare institution that gives