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Importance of adequate nurse staffing
The impact of nurse to patient ratios
The impact of nurse to patient ratios
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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.
IT SHOULD come as no surprise to most nurses that the best and most experienced clinical members of wards or unit teams do not necessarily make the most effective managers. Yet employers persist in appointing senior clinical staff into ward or unit managerial posts, or worse, encourage clinical staff to take up managerial posts and then burden them further by asking them to retain clinica! responsibilities (Stanley 2006a, 2006b}.
There is much overlap when discussing quality and safety in nursing, but it is important to realize that both have their own skills and knowledge essential to the competency. Quality is measuring the rendering of a specific process or action and comparing the data to benchmarks. If the standards are not met then quality improvements are implemented in the hopes of meeting those standards. Were safety is the proactive action of preventing mistakes from occurring, such as knowing a patient is at risk for following and taking precautions such as assisting the patient during ambulation’s. Safety is looking at the environment around you for potential areas of hazard and using critical thinking to make changes for the better of you, co-workers, and patients (Sherwood,
In order for the future of health care to change, changes must begin at the top with stakeholders, the hierarchy and nursing management, nurses as leaders within their organizations. According to Disch J. (2008), nurses as leaders within their organizations need to also step forward, CNEs have the background, perspective, and platform to help their organizations seriously tackle safety issues that jeopardize patient care and that face nurses and their colleagues daily, and are the essential building blocks of all health systems--and
In less acute circumstances, long term outcome of understaffing can also be detrimental to patient condition. Often, when a staff member is overwhelmed with the workload, nursing actions which are perceived less critical may be pushed to the back burner. Debilitated patients may not be turned and repositioned resulting in hospital acquired pressure ulcers, which not only affects patient outcome, but also taxes the hospital
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.
My name is Sherica Hemans. I am a Barry University Nursing Student. I am writing to urge your support against Senate Bill 676 .There is a shortage of primary care physician's across south Florida. However, there are thousands of Nurse Practitioners who I believe can fill this gap. Many Nurse Practitioners have been in school beyond the additional two years after becoming an RN.
Staffing problems can arise because of poor delegation skills or failure as a leader to respond appropriately to budget factors and patient demographics (Thompson, 2012). Nurses are the ones that work closely with each patient and know what supplies are needed to provide appropriate care and services, and they can make a difference on their unit by avoiding unnecessary unscheduled leave that could require overtime and monitoring the use of supplies (Bishop & Sherman,
The healthcare industry has had a particularly rough existence in the last three years. Specifically, the Covid-19 pandemic had a revealing effect that exposed numerous problems within the system. In addition to increasing drug and medical supply costs, one of the more alarming problems is the staffing issues that were created after waves of professionals began leaving the industry and the cost it created for hospitals and care centers. The staffing shortages in the healthcare system have had a significant impact on patient care.
Hiroshima, the bomb named after the city that was demolished by the United States during the final stages of world war two. Harry S. Truman, former president of the United States of America, was in peace negotiations with the United Kingdom, China, and Japan trying to end World War II. “The Potsdam Declaration which called for Japan’s immediate surrender and peace terms was rejected by Japan ”. “Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson felt that it was appropriate to use the United States’ new atomic bomb to end the war quickly and secure the US’s dominant place in the world ”. Whether or not, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified remains in debate up to today.
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.
A healthy nurse must have a healthy and safe work environment. A healthy work environment must have effective policies and procedures and be safe (Carpenter, 2015). The ANA has done a lot of work in the following work environment areas: safe patient handling and mobility, safe needles, fatigue, safe staffing, immunizations, and incivility, bullying, and workplace violence (Carpenter, 2015).
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.
