Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues

Running head: IMPACT OF COMPETING NEEDS TO DEVELOPMENT OF A POLICY1

IMPACT OF COMPETING NEEDS TO DEVELOPMENT OF A POLICY 3

Impact of competing needs to development of a policy

Policies advocate for different agendas within any organization that require to be aligned to the competing demands that impact the development of these policies, such as workforce, resources, and patient's needs. For instance, there is a need to formulate policies that address nurses' adequate staffing to meet the crew and patient needs while reducing the financial cost. Effective deployment and utilization of force within an organization are essential in ensuring quality and efficient healthcare service delivery regarding price, quality, safety, and quantity. The organization's failure to deploy and utilize the available workforce effectively results in an oversupply or shortage of nursing staff. For instance, an excess of nursing staff results in economic inefficiencies and misallocation of resources under the likeness of adequate staffing (Lopez et al., 2015) Shortage of staffing in nursing is associated with various negative impacts like low quality and quantity patient care caused by few resources meant to provide essential services; nurse burnouts caused by heavy workloads, compromised patient safety, and longer waiting hours due to inadequate staffing which lead to preventable deaths.

Competing for a need that impact workload

Balancing the needs of the patients and nurse staffing is a specific competing need within national healthcare issues that impact workload. Many organizations tend to explore various schemes in ensuring a proper balance in the middle of expertise in nursing staff, size, and patient's needs in making sure that safe and quality services are provided to patients under sustainable operation costs. According to Van Den Oetelaar et al. (2016), patients' needs and nursing capacity should match optimally; this can be achieved by a fair and sensible distribution of nurses in units that result in an equally distributed and manageable workload for nursing staff. This ensures a good fit balance between patients’ needs and nursing staff, hence balancing the available and needed resources and averting more costs for overstaffing (van den Oetelaar et al., 2016). This results in reduced patient experiences and employee engagement by inadequate staffing.

Impacts and how policy addresses the competing needs

It's evident that workload impacts both staff and patient needs and resources in any organization. Nurse burnouts result in poor outcomes and errors in inpatient care. Heavy workloads also lead to burnouts and job dissatisfaction and even causes turnover among the nurses due to high costs in training new nurses and using temporary employees in the organization. The policy will help address the competing needs by ensuring that an optimal patient to nurse ratio is achieved, which will help improve nurse staffing and patient outcomes. It will help outline particular patient-to-nurse balances depending on various units within the healthcare organization (Livanos, 2018). Staffing policies within healthcare are essential in improving working conditions for nurses and quality and safe patient care. This will significantly reduce the costs of training new staff, use temporary employees, and reduce turnover among nursing staff.

References

Livanos, N. (2018). A Broadening Coalition: Patient Safety Enters the Nurse-To-Patient Ration Debate. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 9(1), 68-70.

Lopez, M., Almeida, A., & Almada-Lobo, B. (2015). Handling healthcare workforce planning with care: where do we stand? Human Resources for Health13:38.

Van den Oetelaar, van Stel, H., Van Rhenen W, et al. (2016).  Balancing nurses’ workload in hospital wards: study protocol of developing a method to manage workload. BMJ Open, 6 (11), e012148. NURS 6053 week 3 Discussion: Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues