Interprof Org & Sys Leadership-Spring

Addressing Nursing Shortage

By

Walden University

NURS 6053

March 12, 2023.

The issues of nurse shortages have hit medical facilities in different ways. One visible impact is the declining number of nurses attending to patients. This shortage has sometimes led to delayed service delivery since the patient-nurse ratio is declining, with a single nurse sometimes in charge of more patients than the necessary number (Haddad et al., 2022). While the healthcare effects such as death have not been reported yet, the decline in number can sometimes affect response to emergencies. Sometimes, it may be difficult for the nurses to focus more on the patients since they are overwhelmed with the number of patients to care for at a particular time. Today hospitals have to incur additional salaries to ensure the nurses can afford to work overtime beyond their routine schedules, especially on emergency days or when a nurse is on a break. Hospitals pay for these overtime costs, and the prices are redistributed to patients, further increasing medical costs. Other costs, such as incentives and motivation, are also being passed down to patients who should be paying reduced costs for the needed medical services. According to Haddad et al. (2022), medical care costs in the United States have risen by over 10% in the United States, and one of the reasons why hospitals charge more is the rising costs of hiring and retaining nurses, especially specialty nurses.

According to Baker (2022), addressing the nurse shortage requires collaboration from various agencies. First, the government must be willing to expand the nursing population by incentivizing millennials to join nursing and medical schools. This should be done without the patients worrying about high education costs, meaning the government should subsidize the cost. Spurlock (2020) argues that retirement age could be an issue due to the projection that about 640000 nurses are expected to retire by the decade's end. Increasing the retirement age could help new entries get the experience needed for their jobs. However, the main goal should be restoring the message about the impact of nurses in society. It is one of the careers currently facing negative talks, and many would prefer business courses over nursing. Besides increasing salaries and nurse pay to attract teens, public messaging needs to be changed through a positive social media campaign to make the career lucrative (Spurlock, 2020). Hospitals are also taking other measures at organizational levels to attract nursing students. One of the measures is incentivizing nurses to be a part of the workforce, and other hospitals are partnering with medical schools to plan for future recruitment. Other institutions also offer scholarships for nursing students to attract the workforce in the future.

One of the measures presented by various studies to deal with the challenge is automation to help reduce the reliance on human labor. The machines can monitor patient vitals for any changes and inform the medical team, saving nurses the burden of caring for all patients. Automation will also help reduce nurses' work, leaving them with only critical roles; hence, hospitals do not need more nurses. The other strategy is medical diversity and globalization. This involves hiring nurses from countries with more nurses to work in other countries (Marć et al., 2019). This includes countries such as the US hiring from UK, Germany, and Spain which may have more nurses. These measures will promote diversity in our organization, boosting patient care, especially when patients meet and talk with nurses from their ethnic groups. Secondly, automation is our hospital's best cost-saving strategy since it will reduce labor costs but can also threaten existing jobs as the demand for human labor declines in the future.

References

Baker D. W. (2022). Addressing the Nursing Shortage in the United States: An Interview with Dr. Peter Buerhaus. Joint Commission journal on quality and patient safety, 48(5), 298–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2022.02.006

Haddad LM, Annamaraju P, Toney-Butler TJ. (2022). Nursing Shortage. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/

Marć, M., Bartosiewicz, A., Burzyńska, J., Chmiel, Z., & Januszewicz, P. (2019). A nursing shortage - a prospect of global and local policies. International nursing review, 66(1), 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.12473.

Spurlock D., Jr (2020). The Nursing Shortage and the Future of Nursing Education Is in Our Hands. The Journal of nursing education, 59(6), 303–304. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20200520-01