NURS 6053 Assignment Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay NURS 6053 Assignment Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay
Recently, I analyzed some of the challenges we face regarding the shortage of nursing staff. Nurses and healthcare organizations encounter many issues that affect their delivery of care to patients and health populations. Frameworks like the Quadruple Aim offer a host of goals for individuals to pursue to maintain and enhance healthcare. The changes and reforms in the healthcare sector mean that healthcare providers and organizations will always encounter challenges like the nurse staffing shortage amidst rising demand for care and the need to reduce costs (Broome & Marshall, 2021). This letter aims to analyze nurse staffing or personnel shortage in the healthcare sector and how organizations are navigating the issue to meet rising patient needs, reduce costs, and offer high-quality care.
Nursing shortage entails the lack of sufficient levels of staff to meet the legal requirements or ratios for effective care delivery. Different sources and organizations, including federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, estimate that the number of available nursing jobs would increase compared to all professions (ANA, 2022). The BLS attributes this rise to newly created roles, nurses leaving the profession for other areas, and those retiring due to age. The implication is that these factors will lead to the creation of over 175,000 openings for registered nurses every year until 2029 (Department of Labor, 2022). The agency opines that more openings will occur simultaneously within this period among other advanced practice roles like nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and even anesthetists.
In our organization, nurse shortage is a critical issue, as evidenced by the need for nurses to work for long hours and have few of them per shift. These working conditions mean that nurses experience stress, burnout, and fatigue and are susceptible to events like medication errors. Nurses also have to endure an increased workload that makes them experience mental exhaustion since they cannot undertake their duties effectively. Again, nurses in the organization do not get leadership support since the reporting procedure and policy for medication errors lack sufficient safeguards to protect them from litigations. For instance, two nurses left the organization last month because of these issues and the lack of effective mechanisms to solve the ever-rising shortage of personnel, especially when handling emergencies in the emergency room.
According to two professional journal articles that I read, the nursing shortage is not just a national healthcare issue but also a global one affecting the health industry in many countries, especially developing nations. However, developed nations like the United States also face increased shortages of nurses, including specialty nurses, to meet the rising care needs due to reforms in the industry. The first article by Aiken et al. (2022) explores the nursing shortage issue before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study notes that before and during the pandemic, many healthcare organizations experience nurse shortages leading to high levels of nurse burnout. The authors note the need for healthcare facilities to improve their nurse ratios to attain better outcomes and prevent chronic hospital understaffing.
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The second article by Shah et al. (2021) explores the prevalence and factors leading to nursing
NURS 6053 Assignment Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay
burnout in the U.S. The authors are categorical that one of the factors causing burnout among nurses is nurse shortage, as the remaining nurses carry on the workload of others to offer patient care. The implication is that nurses leave their profession and organizations because of burnout and fatigue since they face a myriad of patients with diverse health conditions. Again, the study by Bourgault et al. (2022) emphasizes the effects of burnout associated with the current nursing shortage problem. While addressing this issue requires being data-informed and using a country or setting-unique approach, it is no doubt that nurse shortage is a serious healthcare stressor for nurses and healthcar
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