Essay On Understaffing In Nursing

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.

Professional Association Membership Professional nursing organizations, such as the American Nurses Association (ANA), are dedicated to supporting the field of nursing and advocating for nurses all across America. The ANA is committed to recognizing and advocating on important issues that impact nurses. Some of the issues that the ANA advocates for include safe work environments, better pay, better benefits, and better nurse-patient ratios. The ANA represents approximately 4 million nurses as they work to empower them, support them, and protect them. Furthermore, membership in the ANA is not limited strictly to individuals.

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.

Nurse staffing is a significant region of worry because it can place a strain on patient safety as well as quality of patient care. With cost effectiveness in mind, hospital administrations have elected to reduce nursing staffing ratios and substitute licensed nurses using cheaper unlicensed personnel. This increases uneasiness as the quality of care in hospitals might be undesirably reduced. The necessity to evaluate nurse staffing is essential.

Midwives play an imperitive role when advising women on their care an it is exceptionally important to liase our information in a professional form. Guaranteeing the information is non-biased and informative allowing the women to have control on her decision making (NMC 2017). A quantitive research by Beglry (2010) agress that women who are in our care are to be considered as partners when deciding their plan of care. Within our role a professional relationship is central and women trust midwives deeply. I have found asking open-ended questions promotes and encoursges women to actively take part in the decision making.

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

Introduction Nursing is known as professional discipline (Donaldson & Crowley, 1978). Nurses shortage is one of the significant issues in current nursing in Singapore and also in other countries. According to Buchan et al 2008, nurses shortage has a significant connection with a country’s historical staffing levels, country 's resources and it also estimates the demands for healthcare. Nursing shortages are unmeasureble, and they may be defined as professional capacity standards from an economical view.

how could one expect to receive proper treatment in hospital when your nurse has more than 8 patients to care for which could lead to higher chances of negligence due to sheer exhaustion from over worked nurses. The possibility of patient- procedure- equipment related accidents would be higher. The problem of understaffing could be looked from the perspective of

There is a need for greater reimbursement for nurse staffing for health care organizations. Nurses make up the bulk of medical personnel and are the frontline caregivers and health care providers. I agree with many experts’ opinion that adequate nurse staffing results in favorable patient outcomes and must therefore be financially supported. Dunham-Taylor (2015), argues that “effective workforce management is a key factor contributing to organizational success” (Dunham-Taylor, 2015). Moreover, the author asserts that adequate nurse staffing leads to better patient outcomes, better reimbursement, positive patient satisfaction scores, greater workforce satisfaction, increase employee retention, financial success and organizational stability

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.

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

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).

Short-staffing in hospital settings makes for busier,

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.

CAN A MANAGER BECOME A GOOD LEADER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONCEPT It is important to distinguish an effective manager and a good leader, also to recognise the concept of being a good leader as well as an effective manager, managers aspiring to become a leader can benefit from acquiring leadership skills, a good leader possess several qualities that could easily be termed as good managerial skills. Hence a leader must be well developed physically, mentally and intellectually to be able to assume such positions. In this current challenging world is crucial for every manager to possess excellent management skills and develop exemplifying qualities of a good leader.