Decision Making & problem solving in Nursing career

Name:

ID Number: 44

Course Instructor: Prof. Ahmad Aboshaiqah

2022G- 1443H

Introduction

The Saudi health sector is witnessing rapid development in recent times for several reasons, including population growth, economic development, pillars of development and most importantly, factors related to patients such as health awareness and prevalent diseases. This development conforms to the vision of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2030, in which National Transformation Program has been customized to support the vision. One of the goals of the strategic vision is "to increase the attractiveness of work in the nursing profession", which clarifies the main role of nursing in the health care team, especially nursing staff consider as largest group of health care practitioner and the core of delivering health services in the health care institutions(Alluhidan et al., 2020).

According to the statistics of the Saudi Ministry of Health in their annual statistical book for 1440 H, the total number of Saudi nurses is (62685), which is around 60% of the total nursing workforce (Table 1) shown the nurses number from 2014-2018 (MOH, 2020).In addition (Table 2) shown in the numbers of nurses in 2019 (MOH, 2019). Despite the remarkable gradual increase in the number of Saudi nurses during the previous years, it is still not enough to meet the actual needs of the labor market. This constitutes a burden on the efficiency and productivity of the Saudi health care system, especially at the present time, with the existence of the pandemic and the resignations of a number of expatriate nurses, whether due to family circumstances or because of competitive job opportunities elsewhere.

Table 1: the nurses' numbers 2014-2018

Table 2: the nurses' numbers 2015-2019

In all health fields, the professions face challenges that may be workflow as desired. One of the biggest and most difficult challenges that nursing faces, whether internationally or nationally, is the shortage of nursing staff, which is the main problem in this essay. This essay will discuss how we going to approach the main problem (shortage of nurses in Saudi Arabia) using the six steps to solve the problem. After the main problem has been identified as a first step. Second, we will review some studies that discussed about it in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to determine the causes of this problem. In a purpose to determine causes of the problem we will use a cause-and-effect diagram and figure out the possible causes/ sub-causes from previous studies (Lamadah & Sayed, 2014;Aldiabat et al., 2016;Alluhidan et al., 2020; Elmorshedy et al., 2020), it shown in (Fig.1) .

Based on previous studies, after this process it observed five reasons that were repeated in on previous studies, which identified as root causes, as follows: Work overload, Long working hours, Lack of support specially for working mothers, knowing that the majority of nursing mothers are females, Lack of career development opportunities, lack of training programs that rely on clinical training, and finally community's image about nursing.

Then, according to the root causes that were previously worked on, alternative solutions are generated, which are as follows:

1- Redesign the nurses' work based on their scope of practice.

2- Let the nurses take the lead to examine alternatives ways that can help them to reduce the work overload.

3- Change the delivery care models like team nursing instead of total patient care for period of time, its chance also for limited experiences staff to learn from their peers to become experts.

4- Had flexible schedules and working hours with maintaining the quality of the work and equality among the staff.

5- Give the nurses the chance to design their working schedule based on their situations.

6- Provide consultation clinics for nurses to help them how to balanced work and social life as well as how to deal with job stress and other concerns.

7- Establish a day nursery for the children of working mothers inside the healthcare facilities.

8- Cooperate with a nursery school with a reasonable price to provide services for the employees' children.

9- Provide one to two hours for study per week in the library during working hours to improve nurse's knowledge and skills.

10- Collaborate with other excellence hospitals for Design clinical programs based on nurse's needs.

11- Cooperating with external simulation labs so that the nurses can conduct training according to their special needs, whether the communication is from the health facility or from the employee himself.

12- Train high school students and hire them as volunteers to support the nurses as well as knowing the profession betters, which can increase the chances to choose the nurses as career.

13- Correct promotion of the profession through social media, with the full definition of the profession, the scope of its practice, and the career, educational and personal opportunities that the profession provides.

14- Reducing the number of years of studying for a baccalaureate degree for the major of nursing or making summer classes available to complete them in the shortest time.

Consequence table will be used to examine each of the alternatives and eliminating undesirable choices, it shown in (Table 3) . Its appear now that we have four solutions that meets our objectives. This the time that we will develop an implementation plan that describe how we will work on these solutions. It is shown in (Table 4) .

The final step is to evaluate the outcome obtained to determine whether the solution we have chosen is suitable for the problem. In the current problem, the solutions that have been chosen are not solving the problem in an immediate manner, but rather contribute to improving the functional environment that could attract the new generation to the profession and keep the current nursing, as well as reduce the reasons that caused the shortage of nursing staff. Usually it takes time to see the result but it can be measured the progress form many indicators like: job satisfaction, workload level, stress level and the self-development.

References

Aldiabat, K., Alarifi, A., Al-Gohal, N., Alharbi, M., Alshehri, A., Alshomrani, A., Darraj, S., & Sayed, A. (2016). Why do nurses leave bedside nursing. International Journal of Nursing Student Scholarship, 3. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca