NURS 6053 REVIEW OF CURRENT HEALTHCARE ISSUES Purpose Statement The purpose of this discussion is to explain the national nursing shortage issue, how it impacts my organization, the social determinates, and how my organization is handling the issue.
NURS 6053 REVIEW OF CURRENT HEALTHCARE ISSUES
Purpose Statement
The purpose of this discussion is to explain the national nursing shortage issue, how it impacts my organization, the social determinates, and how my organization is handling the issue.
National Health Care Issue
Nursing shortages have been affecting healthcare for decades. As the baby boomers (BB) step closer towards retirement, the need for nurses is at an even higher demand. (AACN, 2022).The nursing profession continues to face shortages due to a lack of educators, high turnover rates, and decreased orientation schedules. (Asamani, et al. 2021).
Since the Covid 19 pandemic, nurses either retired, left their staff nursing position, and started doing travel/agency nursing for flexibility, scheduling autonomy, and a significant increase in pay, or left the field all together. The nursing shortage is affecting patient outcomes and making nurses choose less quality care due to increased patient ratios.
The impact in my work setting
My work setting is greatly affected by nurse burnout and staff shortages. Nurses are not able to sustain the quality of nursing care with patient overload. At some point throughout the shift, one patient’s care or deterioration, will take away that assigned nurse and their other patients will be neglected and receive the bare minimum of care, so the nurse ends her shift on time. Having a 3:1 ratio in ICU or 5- 6:1 on a med-surg unit is unsafe and below the standard of care. (Bourgault, 2022) But because so many nurses have left their unit, hospital or nursing all together, the nurses that remain, suffer the consequences.
Nurses cannot engage in self-care because they feel guilty about saying no to working when their colleagues are short staffed and overworked, so they too, will pick up an extra shift to help. This turns into nurses working 5 or 6 days in a row, 12–16 hour shifts. If the numbers are met or somewhat balances out, leadership turns a blind eye. Occasionally, you will have a nurse manager that can and will do the job of their staff, they are willing to run the floor or take an assignment, but that is far and few between. (Seymour, 2022).
The underlying causes are the lack flexibility, loss of work life balance, unsafe working conditions, the lack of acknowledgment and appreciation from leadership of working harder, longer hours and with a much larger patient workload, as well as the willingness to pay agency nurses astronomical amounts of money and not compensate their staff at all.
Social determinates affects
The nursing shortage greatly affects access to quality healthcare and education, and social and community context. Quality healthcare is compromised when the nurse patient ratio is higher then normal. Depending upon the patient’s acuity level and needs. That changes the plan for the nurse’s care with that patient and the other patients they have. Patient outcomes are increased, and patient safety becomes a major issue. An increase in medical and medication errors increase due to nor paying attention to detail.
Education for the patients is lacking because nurses are not spending the needed time to truly understand and the educational aspects of their patients due to the increased work load. Spending too much time puts the nurse behind in her shift which then, can lead to decreased patient outcomes.
According to Healthy People 2030, people’s relationships and interactions with family, friends, co-workers, and community members can have a major impact on their health and well-being. When nurses are not happy, weather from personal issues or work related stressors, the quality of their health is affected, therefore causing poor care and treatment to their patients, decreasing patient outcomes.
Health system work setting response
My organizations response to the nursing shortage is, you are replaceable. The holes that need to be filled within a daily schedule are astronomical. Their solution is travel and agency nurses. Leadership is not addressing the root cause of the problem. Either they do not care or they are scared to speak up because they do not want fall out from administration. They do not perform exist interviews or do one to one check-in with their staff to see what personal life stressors are affecting their work ethic. People tend to worker harder, better, and are more open when they know they manager supports and respects them. The workers are more likely to go to them when a problem arises. But that is not happening, and they leave, causing vacancies in the schedule. Once the full-time equivalent hours (FTE’s) get to a certain percentage, travel and agency are added into the budget to fill the holes.
Conclusion
The nursing shortage will continue to grow and affect patient outcomes if the leadership, administration, board members, and stakeholders of the organizations are not open to listening. Understanding what the cause is, can often times lead to negotiations, but if there are not people in positions that are willing and able to listen, the cycle will continue.
References
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). (2022). Nursing Shortage
https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-information/fact-sheets/nursing-shortageLinks to an external site.
Asamani, J.A., Ismaila, H., Plange, A. et al. (2021). The cost of health workforce gaps and inequitable distribution in the Ghana Health Service: an analysis towards evidence-based health workforce planning and management. Hum Resour Health 19, 43.
