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Challenges in Public Healthcare Facilities

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Challenges in Public Healthcare Facilities

Public Healthcare facilities have different goals to achieve. This includes ensuring there is excellent services provided to their patients, operational and quality care excellence as well as retaining its employees. According to Van den Oetelaar et al. (2016), nurses are very significant in healthcare delivery since they are the one who devotes most of the time with the patients. These people influence the experiences of the patients and ensure their satisfaction is met within the facility. Nursing is very critical in any hospital in ensuring that the quality of care and the outcome of the patients are met. Therefore, nursing staffing is a very important component in the healthcare delivery system as well as the safety of the facilities.

However, public facilities have faced with the challenge of heavy nurse workload. The nursing workload is defined as the ration of the nurses compare with the number of hospitalized patients. For example, Alabama state hospital has different units such as pediatric, medical-surgical, intensive care, surgery, medicine, specialists and psychiatry unit. All these units hospitalize 3000 with only 80 nurses and 150 nursing assistants (Kieft et al., 2014). This shows that there is a heavy nurse workload in this hospital. The consequences of this are that there is a compromised patient safety in this hospital. The patient safety threats are classified as medical errors, incidences related to mechanical containment and patient falls which is highly related to overworked nurses and nursing assistants. This is a real problem in the healthcare facilities.

The hospitals have reported several factors that have led to the increased nurse workload. The first reason cited is the increase in the demand of nurses in the United States. This is highly contributed by the increase of the aging population. According to Gurses et al. (2009), this population is expected to increase by 18% by the year 2030 which raises alarm in the high rate of healthcare needs growth. Secondly, there is an inadequate supply of the nurses to meet the current and expected demand for healthcare needs. The shortage is expected to accelerate as the future needs increases and the nursing institutions are unable to cope up with the demands. As the demands increase the workload as an increase on those on the job.

Again the increased cost of healthcare services has made most hospitals to reduce the number of nursing staff. The remaining staffs are subjected to mandatory overtime routines to meet the high demands and as a result, there is increased nursing workload. The pressure by the healthcare facilities to reduce the number of patient’s length day as male nurses to work intensively to meet those deadlines. In addition, nurses are also expected to perform non-professional duties such as delivering food, patients' transportation, and housekeeping duties. This nurse workload has severe impacts on nursing job satisfaction which leads to the shortage of nursing as well as high nursing turn over (Carlesi, et al., 2017)

References

Carlesi, K. C., Padilha, K. G., Toffoletto, M. C., Henriquez-Roldán, C., & Juan, M. A. (2017). Patient Safety Incidents and Nursing Workload. Revista Latino-americana de enfermagem, 25, e2841. doi:10.1590/1518-8345.1280.2841

Gurses, A. P., Carayon, P., & Wall, M. (2009). Impact of performance obstacles on intensive care nurses' workload, perceived quality, and safety of care, and quality of working life. Health services research, 44(2p1), 422-443.

Kieft, R. A., de Brouwer, B. B., Francke, A. L., & Delnoij, D. M. (2014). How nurses and their work environment affect patient experiences of the quality of care: a qualitative study. BMC health services research, 14, 249. doi:10.1186/1472-6963-14-249

van den Oetelaar, W. F., van Stel, H. F., van Rhenen, W., Stellato, R. K., & Grolman, W. (2016). Balancing nurses' workload in hospital wards: study protocol of developing a method to manage workload. BMJ Open, 6(11), e012148. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012148