Assistance

Understaffing in Nursing

Student’s Name:

Course Title:

Course Number:

Professor’s Name:

Date:

Understaffing in Nursing

Understaffing in nursing comes with a lot of challenges to care delivery. Patients' welfare can be jeopardized when healthcare institutions have insufficient nursing staff. Furthermore, overworked nurses may overlook nuances or fail to interact properly with patients, which may make patients may be unsatisfied with the nursing performance. Increased workloads are associated with burnout and fatigue since nurses end up working for long hours with inadequate rest (Griffiths et al., 2020). It is impossible to give the best patient care when a healthcare professional is stressed as it increases the risk of making errors. Understaffing can put nurses under pressure; thus, inducing stress and making it difficult to concentrate on their work. Medication errors are attributed to problems of understaffing (Haddad et al., 2020). It is easy for nurses to make mistakes when they are not in a good state of mind. As the nurse-patient ratio increase, the quality of care is more likely to decrease.

Since the healthcare sector is moving in the direction of patient-centered care, patient satisfaction is critical. Patients can help or harm the facility's reputation by voicing their concerns and expressing their dissatisfaction with the services provided in a healthcare facility. Dissatisfied patients are less likely to refer others to a certain care facility or return, which may have an impact on healthcare organizations’ financial returns. Healthcare organizations must focus their efforts on retaining nurses by ensuring that they have effective and safe working circumstances (Glette et al., 2017). Employers should collaborate with registered nurses to implement flexible staffing strategies in their facilities.

The problem of understaffing is linked to the shortage of nurses in many countries. With healthcare facilities operating 24 hours a day and the increasing patient health care demands, more and more nurses are needed to help meet these demands round-the-clock (Haddad et al., 2020). Despite that, the nursing workforce itself is rapidly aging, and there is yet to be found a solution to fill these gaps with new young nurses. Nurses have to undergo professional training and prove to be competent to be recruited to the nursing workforce. As time passes by, more nurses should be trained to fill the gaps of the aging nurse population as well as helping to deal with the problem of nurse shortage. The importation of nurses has helped to try and resolve the issues of nurse shortage.

Patient outcomes are largely dependent on the care they receive from nurses (Griffiths et al., 2020). The care has to be consistent and effective from assessment to hospitalization to recovery. An experience observed in a clinical setting concerning understaffing is in a certain care facility where there was a shortage of nurses. The facility experienced long queues pf patients who had to wait for many hours before they were attended to. This resulted in violent behavior from some of the patients and their families leading to an injury to a nurse. The average waiting time was 6 hours, and a significant number of patients could leave without being treated. The problem exposed the few nurses in the facility to stress and burnout, as well as the risk of violence from impatient patients and visitors.

References

Glette, M. K., Aase, K., & Wiig, S. (2017). The relationship between understaffing of nurses and patient safety in hospitals-A literature review with thematic analysis. Open Journal of Nursing, 7(12), 1387-1429. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojn.2017.712100

Griffiths, P., Saville, C., Ball, J., Jones, J., Pattison, N., Monks, T., & Safer Nursing Care Study Group (2020). Nursing workload, nurse staffing methodologies, and tools: A systematic scoping review and discussion. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 103, 103487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2019.103487

Haddad, L. M., Annamaraju, P., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2020). Nursing shortage. StatPearls Publishing.