The Importance Of Nurse Staffing In Nursing

Throughout history nurses have been under appreciated, not to say its done on purpose. Luckily, the best nurses do not do what they do for praise or approval but because we care and want to see our patients improve. When I first read this article I was agitated at the fact that nurses werent even considered for a role in the Quality Alliance Steering Committee. Considering nurses play such a large rold in patient care and outcomes

Discussion Post NURS 6531 Week One Nurse Practitioner Competencies Quality As we further our education to become advanced practice nurses (APNs), it is crucial that we understand the behaviors or core competencies expected of all APNs. For the purpose of this discussion, I will evaluate the core competency of quality and how I will integrate this behavior into my daily practice.

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.

Outcomes demonstrated that patient access to care improved and there was high quality of care provided. Edmunds, M. (1978). Evaluation of nurse practitioner effectiveness: An overview of the literature. Evaluation and the Health Professions. 1, 69-82 (E, A, I P/A) This article provides an overview of published literature that focuses on the effectiveness of the NP.

Bedside reporting has been shown to improve communication and quality of handoff between nurses. It is also credited to promote patient safety and improve patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction, patient safety and nursing communication and quality of report from a 32 bed surgical hospital in Dallas, Texas is to be evaluated using various surveys, HCAHPS scores, incident reports, and call light logs. Data will be collected 2 months prior and 6 months following the implementation of bedside report. Scores and communication survey results will be reviewed in this time period to determine increases or decreases from pre-implementation results using traditional nurse-to-nurse report..

In the Vila Heath scenario, data is presented from St. Anthony Medical Center in Minneapolis. The areas of concern are: RN turnover, medication errors, and admissions by age. When evaluating the data, there are limitations for interpreting the data since there are critical pieces of information missing. This review of the data is an assumption based on data from national studies and statistics. RN

According to Stanton, low-staffed hospitals resulted in higher incidences of poor patient outcomes. Such as, UTIs, pneumonia, and fall. However, poor patient outcomes not only result from short-staffed nurses, but can also result from inadequate nursing assistants as well. NAs play a great role in providing basic daily care of patients. These professionals are very crucial in the healthcare industry but sadly, there are NA shortages.

This article talks about how studies show how staffing measurements effectquality of care and how risk adjustment variables play a role in the outcomes. Staffingmeasures include the amount of nursing staff per patient and the amount of hours aresident gets with staff members and staff member retention. The studies show thatincreased time with licensed staff have improved care and provided much betteroutcomes than with time with for example a social worker. It says that it is difficult tocalculate the retention of staff because the studies are inconsistent. Quality of care ischaracterized by resident and facility outcomes.

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.

Nurses play an essential role in the healthcare industry. The nurse workforce is made up of licensed nurses: registered nurses (RNs), licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs), along with nurse aides. Registered nurses are responsible for assessments of patients’ needs, development of care plans, medication administration, and treatments, while licensed vocational nurses perform specific care under the delegation of the registered nurses and supervisions. Nursing aides perform activities of daily living (unskilled attention) to the patient. Adequate nursing staffing is essential to both patient care and outcomes, also to the retention of nurses while inadequate staffing creates problems for both the patients and

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.

Ethical Issues in Nursing: Nurse-Patient Ratios Megan Harvey, Katie McKelvery, Erica Robbins & Cassandra Tingley St. Johns River State College March 2018 Ethical Issues in Nursing: Nurse-Patient Ratios Every day nurses are faced with ethical dilemmas. Challenges in these situations are becoming more and more complex due to increasing workload and sicker patients. When a nursing unit is understaffed not only are nurses more likely to become burnt out, but their patients are far less likely to receive the quality of care they deserve. The problem is that the Federal regulations require hospitals who participate in Medicare to “have ‘adequate’ numbers of licensed nurses (RN, LPN, CNA) to provide care to all patients as needed,” but the regulations

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).

Empirical Referents Empirical referent studies support Watson’s theory by affirming the existence of a positive relationship between patient satisfaction and nurse caring behaviors in numerous clinical settings. Nursing education plays a significant role in the achievement the caring concept and is accentuated throughout the nurse's professional career (Labrague, Mcenroe-Petitte, Papathanasiou, Edet, & Arulappan, 2015). Patient satisfaction is a measurable component used to determine the care received from nurse clinicians. Stroehlein (2016) indicates that although there is a large constituent of many occupations, caring in the nursing occupation assumes an exceptional meaning with a higher purpose. Caring is multifaceted and comparable have determined individuals whose intention is to open the eyes of the society through rendering high quality patient care (Stroehlein, 2016).

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.