More handpicked essays just for you.
Essay on staffing issues in nursing
Nursing staffing thesisss
The Effects of Nurse Staffing on Quality of Care
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
State-mandated nurse-to-patient ratios remains a controversial topic in healthcare. Sufficient nurse staffing is key to ensure adequate patient care, while scarce staffing effects patients’ safety and puts nurses at risk for burnout. Determining nurse-to-patient ratios in nursing facilities remains a challenge for the nursing profession. There are many factors to consider when determining staffing methods, such as cost, nurses’ satisfaction, patient outcomes and safety. Mandating ratios is one attempt at ensuring nurses’ workloads do not exceed what is needed for adequate patient care and safety.
The scope of practice of a family nurse practitioner enables them the ability to serve as a primary care provider for families. This includes providing care for each member of the family individually and for the entire family collectively as a whole. Family nurse practitioners typically work in either a family practice or community health setting, where they are often responsible for the care of the entire family. Within each setting, there are numerous cultural variations that a family nurse practitioner might encounter. It is important that the family nurse practitioner is able to meet the families’ and are culturally competent when doing so.
In order to run this facility and as the same be able to give the best care to their patients the company large team of employees.38 percent of the facility employees is nursing department ,this department cover all three shifts thus why it covers almost half of employees. The nursing department spending budgeted for year the 2014 was expected to be $2, 149, 14; this includes nurses, certified medication aides and certified nursing assistants. The actual nursing department spending was $1,541,322. Dietary was 12% of the expense, Maintenance and Utilities at 7%, housekeeping and activities were at 4% each and laundry at 1%. The other expenses include Property Insurance/taxes at 1%, Ancillary expenses which were 22%, general and administration, which was 9% and social servises was budgeted at
Ivy Tech Community College School of Nursing NRSG 128 Practice Issues for the Practical Nurse Discussion Rubric Name: ___Jasmine Liubakka___________ Date: _________10-27-15_______________ Topic of Discussion: Should the impaired nurse be allowed to return to work? Position on Topic: (1) Points ________________ Yes, I feel that as long as the nurse participates in a program that includes requirements of regular attendance at support group meetings, personal and active involvement with a 12-step sponsor, and close contact with a case manager or monitor of an alternative program, she should be allowed to return to work.
The authors also use statistics which shows they have done their research. This allows the audience to believe this article is a reliable
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.
Due to hospital care reaching an all-time high in America, we need nurses now more than ever before. Currently in America, we have an issue with nurses having too many paperwork to fill out. In the article “We Need More Nurses” by Alexandra Robbins argues we need more nurses in the hospital. Nursing shortage has been a common issue throughout the world. Because of this issue others are being affected in many different ways.
In studying Registered Nursing one will find that they have to be compassionate and want to care for others. Registered Nurses assist physicians with suffering patients of any medical condition. They help to decide the patient’s medicine, treatment, recovery, and educate the them and their families on post-medical treatment. They need to have bedside manner, and be able to prepare patients for surgery. Registered Nursing careers range anywhere from critical care, oncology, mental health, to an everyday school nurse.
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).
Large patient loads combined with a stressful work environment affects nurses’ abilities to provide quality healthcare. Patient safety should never be compromised. It is our responsibility to learn from research and improve our current nurse staffing ratios. Nurse staffing is key and affects all other outcomes. Without nurses administering the right treatment at the right time to the right patients, all other healthcare interventions are not effective.
To better understand the data found, I have organized the literature review into
Dr. Jean Watson’s theory of care addressed the nurse to patient ration, according to the method “nursing is positioned with caring of the sick, prevention of sickness, restoration of health and promotion of health. This process includes the process of assessment, plan, intervention, and evaluation. On the review, the nurse observes, identifies, review problem(s) and forms a care plan that will be used in appropriate nursing care. When the nurse to patient ratio is low, the nurse will not be able to perform this assessment. This will result in a reduction of patients’ outcomes, medical errors, frequent re-admissions, patient deaths.
A recent study by Griffiths (2008) showed the fundamentals of patient care may have been lost and patient focus was diminished. He explained that nursing had become too technical due to the healthcare environmental crisis and the focus was taken away from the fundamentals of patient care. Although the ward on clinical placement was evidently over stretched, the fundamentals of patient care was still upheld due to the regiment implementation of the RLT model of nursing. Initial assessment allowed nurses to plan and implement measures from early admission which inevitably made all aspects nursing care
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.
Understaffing in hospitals is a major problem that has been affecting healthcare workers and patients for many years. I have chosen to highlight understaffing as a patient safety issue because of the consequences that can arise from it. Shortages in staffing can result in an increase of infection rates (Stone et al., 2007) leading to complications and poorer patient outcomes (Needleman et al. 2002). This particular issue is of interest to me because I have experienced and witnessed it myself. As a midwifery student in a busy maternity hospital, I can appreciate the hard work and dedication each midwife gives to their patients.
