Introduction
The decisions and actions of today’s nurses should be based on evidence obtained from clinical research. Patients need quality and safe care that will help them to recover from their health problems. They select hospitals based on the quality of care that they are able to provide. Additionally, medical insurance organizations use quality of care as the basis for reimbursement. Therefore, contemporary healthcare organizations strive to maintain a good public image by providing quality and safe patient care. They ensure that the practice standards that nurses use as guidance during healthcare delivery are evidence-based (Burns, 2011). The purpose of this capstone project is to identify an evidence-based practice approach that can be used to address the problem of nurse shortage in healthcare settings. The development of an evidence-based practice process begins with the identification of a clinical practice problem.
Clinical Practice Problem
Healthcare systems often face problems associated with the shortage of qualified nurses. Nurses are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that patients receive quality and safe care (Rochefort, Buckeridge & Abrahamowicz, 2015). The authors further assert that in the past years, the healthcare industry has experienced an increased need for more registered nurses caused by a longer length of stay in the hospital and increased patient acuity. An inadequate number of staff nurses is associated with negative patient outcomes. High cases of adverse events are usually reported in medical facilities where the available registered nurses cannot adequately provide healthcare services to patients (D’Lima, Murray, & Brett, 2018). It is important to develop a PICOT statement that will act as guidance when locating relevant articles that have exhaustively explored the nursing practice under discussion.
PICOT Statement
The PICOT statement that will act as a framework for the capstone project has been developed by considering five major elements. The elements include the Patient/Population (P), Intervention (I), Comparison (C), Outcome (O), and Time (T). The PICOT statement reads;
“For patients who are receiving care in healthcare settings (P), does hiring an adequate number of nurses (I) reduce incidences of adverse events or improve patient safety outcomes (O) as compared to an inadequate number of nurses (C) within a period of 3 months (T).
Literature Search
A comprehensive literature search has been conducted to locate articles in which the authors have explored the nursing practice problem in detail. The nursing databases that have been searched include Cochrane, CIHAHL, Google Scholar, and PubMed. A number of search terms have been used when exploring the databases. The key search terms that have been used to locate the articles include “poor nurse staffing” and “the impacts of inadequate nurse staffing on patient outcomes.” A total of six articles that address the research problem have been located and reviewed. Some of them are qualitative studies while others are quantitative.
Research Critique and Literature Review
Research critique of the articles has been conducted in order to gather the information that the researchers have published in relation to the research problem. The researchers have explored how patient outcomes are affected by nurse staffing in different types of healthcare settings. The research critique of both qualitative and quantitative studies have focused on the background of the study, the method of the study, research findings, ethical considerations, and conclusions. The qualitative methods were appropriate to answer the research questions, while the quantitative approaches were effective for addressing research hypotheses. Furthermore, the researchers of all the reviewed studies have interpreted findings in a manner that can easily be understood by the reader. Moreover, the authors have made appropriate ethical considerations when using human subjects as study participants. In all the studies, the conclusions are congruent to the thesis statements as they clearly highlight how the studies have addressed respective research problems.
An inadequate number of nurses is associated with increased nursing workload, patient mortality, and patient safety incidents. Fagerstrom, Kinnunen, and Saarela (2017) conducted an observational study to determine the effects of nursing workload on patient mortality rates and patient safety. They discovered that patient outcomes are determined by the amount of workload al
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