Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
The identified stressor is nursing shortage. The combinations of improved quality of life and advancements in medical sciences have caused community members to live longer on average. This trend is especially evidence among older adults (geriatric age group) with the numbers only expected to rise (Marc et al., 2019). It is important to note that living longer does not necessarily imply that individuals are living healthier lives as more people suffer from chronic ailments (such as diabetes, allergies, high cholesterol, hypertension and so on) thereby leading to a greater need for medical and nursing care (Spurlock, 2020). In fact, nursing shortage results in the lack of adequate numbers of nursing personnel with impacts on the patients’ wellbeing to include overcrowded emergency departments, more medication errors, and higher patient mortality (Rosenberg, 2019).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.
It is evident that nursing shortage is a health care stressor as it impacts care outcomes and wellbeing of stakeholders. Still, there are two significant competing needs that hinder efforts to address nursing shortage. The first competing need is investment in information technologies (IT) targeted at addressing health care disparities. Health IT is considered as a good investment that can reduce the probability of errors and redundant procedures, improve guideline and protocol compliance, and foster better coordinated care thereby encouragement more equitable care delivery (Lee, 2015).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. Health IT presents tools such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and electronic health records (EHR) have been shown as vital for initiating and carrying forward reforms targeted at improving health car access, improving the quality and efficiency of care, reducing medical errors, and improving care delivery systems. Besides that, the role of health IT in preventing medical mistakes and reducing health care costs has been recognizing so that medical organizations are increasingly investing in health IT as a critical tool for supporting medical personnel. Overall, investment in health IT is considered as a means of improving the quality and efficiency of health care and containing costs thereby competing with the need to employ more medical personnel (Lee, 2015). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.
The second competing need is efforts to improving financial returns while curbing costs/spending since medical organizations must be financially viable to continue operating even as they professionally and expertly attend to the care needs of their patients. Rising health care costs is a significant concern, especially in the face of increasing numbers of populations unable to pay for health care. Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.The reality is that medical organizations are essentially business entities and make financial sense in order to continue operating. This is irrespective of whether the organization is a for profit or not for profit business entity. For profit organizations seeks to make financial returns to the investors while not for profit organizations seeks to continue operating by at least breaking even. It is for this reason that management in medical organizations are making significant efforts to curb expenditure by applying economic principles such as pay for performance incentives, lean management, bundling and capping payments, limiting services, and fundholding. Curbing spending implies that less funds would be spent on increasing staffing since this is a significant cost (Sturmberg & Bircher, 2019). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.
Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
The organization has adopted an acuity-based nurse staffing model. In this case, staffing based on expected/anticipated patient acuity intended to optimize the use of the available nursing staff so that there are no wastages. The organization recognizes that nursing are needs are very dynamic and subject to a myriad of unit level and patient conditions that could significantly vary form one moment to the next moment. Given this awareness, the organization’s staffing policies considers the acuity of each patient and overall acuity mix in the departments and units before determining the number of nursing staff and their skills mix for each department/unit (Welton, 2017).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. For instance, the emergency and acute care departments have higher nurse-to-patient ratios since patients who ar
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