The healthcare issue or stressor identified earlier is nursing staff shortage in the healthcare organization. As can be surmised, this issue has far-reaching implications on the quality of care that a health institution can offer (Antwi & Bowblis, 2018). This fact derives from the simple fact that nurses are the one with direct contact to patients and therefore form the face of the organization’s service product. This paper therefore takes a look at this healthcare stressor in terms of competing organizational interest that impact it such as nurses’ need for better pay and a conducive working environment, and the patients’ need to be offered the best quality care possible by nurses who are committed to their job.
In the above context, therefore, the two competing needs in the organization that directly influence this healthcare stressor (nurse shortage) are:
A Relevant Policy Influencing Nurse Shortage as a Healthcare Stressor
One of the organizational policies in my facility that directly influences nursing shortage is the policy of hiring only short-term contractual employees. The contractual agreement between each employee and the organization does not exceed five years. After this, if an employee wishes to continue working for the organization they have to renew their contract. There are no permanent employees in the organization who have full benefits that come with the status. This is a policy that was put in the organization’s strategic plan as a way to save on costs and spend less on human resource. The thinking was that a long-serving employee is more likely to ask for better pay than a new recruit who is fresh from college. Unfortunately, this policy only makes the experienced nurses feel that they are neither valued by the organization nor appreciated. As a result, whenever they get better offers of job security elsewhere, they do not hesitate to tender their resignations. Nurse shortage is therefore a perennial problem at the institution because of this policy (Perry et al., 2018; Cheng et al., 2016).
The policy has thus affected not only the effectiveness of healthcare service delivery, but also its quality. The ratio of nurses to patients in every given shift is one of the parameters with which quality of nursing care is assessed (Rubin, 2015). When there is a perennial shortage of nurses, there is a perennial non-compliance with the professional standards of nursing practice that outline the amount of work that a nurse can comfortably handle. With passage of time, the remaining nurses become overworked and soon start experiencing burnout. What ensues is a vicious cycle of resignations and a drop in the quality of nursing care in the organization (Wise, 2018). NURS 6053 Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Ethical Critique of the Above Policy
The bioethical principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice require that all patients be handled in such a way that only good is done to them, no harm is brought to them, and fairness is exercised. With a policy that encourages and facilitates nurses to leave the organization for better employers, none of these ethical principles is respected. The low nurse numbers means that clinical tasks cannot be completed correctly and in a timely manner. Patients might thus miss their medication timings, especially those on insulin who may then even go into life-threatening metabolic crises. This is clearly a violation of beneficence and nonmaleficence. Because the patients are also denied the chance to have enough nurses to take good care of them, no justice is done to them and fairness becomes non-existent.
The only strength of the policy above in promoting ethics would be that a new employee is always eager to follow rules, regulations, and standards of practice than those that have stayed for longer. They will not take short-cuts in delivering care and will be compassionate towards the patients because they know t
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