Nursing understaffing is caused by the stressful workload of the profession. Since nursing burnout has a potential to be harmful to patient safety, it is vital to carefully consider the implementation of procedures aimed at the minimization of burnout rates among nurses. The health condition of nurses occupied in acute care hospitals is endangered. The quality of their performance reflects their psychological well-being. In case of negative attitude to the accomplishments, the nurses neglect their professional responsibilities and undermine patients’ safety. That is why it is essential to supply the employees suffering from the emotional exhaustion with professional therapeutic practices.
According to the implementation plan within this project, targeted institutions will include local primary hospitals and the intensive care units, in particular. The participants will take part in the project on a voluntary basis. The professional therapists will be invited for the implementation of different kinds of procedures aimed at burnout relief. The processes will be of an educational character to ensure the nurses’ awareness about their emotional state as implied by the self-care nursing theory application. These will include group and individual practices aimed at dealing with stress and burnout. The therapists will retrieve feedback information from the participants to monitor the state of their psychological condition. They will identify the causes of the particular cases and find the ways of overcoming them. The implementation of therapeutic procedures will contribute to the decrease in emotional tension, higher accomplishments rates, the overall positive attitude to work, and consequently to the solving of the nursing understaffing problem.
The difficulties related to the burnout therapy application might include the following. The voluntary basis of attracting the potential participants might engage a lacking number of nurses that will diminish the reliability of the outcomes. Concerning this barrier, it would be rational to provide some motivational reward for those exposed to intervention implementation. Regarding the limitation of the participants to the employees primarily of the intensive care units, there is a potential bias in results. The interventions applied to the participants occupied in acute care hospitals might be insufficient for the nurses of other medical facilities. It would be relevant to widen the scope of participants involved to diversify the population and to customize the procedures according to the needs of specific areas of nurses’ practice.
The effectiveness of such therapeutic interventions should be tested and empirically studied to analyze their applicability to a broader range of participants. Only the proof of the practical efficiency of the project plan will guarantee the sufficient investing in the nursing sphere for the employees’ retaining (Van den Heede et al., 2013). Establishing therapy facilities for nurses on a regular basis will improve the situation in the nursing stuffing.
In conclusion, nursing understaffing is caused primarily by the emotional exhaustion of medical workers due to the stressful workload in the sector. Although the implementation of therapeutic interventions within the framework of self-care nursing theory in the chosen hospitals is expected to be successful, some difficulties might occur. They include the limited number of voluntary participants, the limitation to intensive care units, and insufficient investment. However, in case of successful results of the project plan implementation, the data could be used for multiple healthcare institutions to solve the problem of nursing understaffing.
Alligood, M.R. (2013). Nursing theory: Utilization and application (5th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Health Sciences.
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