With baby boomers reaching retirement age they will need health care services which only increases the demand for nurses. These issues conflict as some nurses are baby boomers
In the short term, many settings have been using agency nurses, ourselves included. This is positive as they can be called on short notice. However, they may not have been to the homes before. The Care Homes I work in are large, both with over 40 beds each, they are also not purpose built, which means the rooms are spread out across different floors and areas, which if you are not used to them, can be difficult to navigate. Also, most of the residents have been there for some time, they therefore know the staff and the staff know them, their special needs and requirements and the best way to care for them.
One primary factor is the population growth patterns. Currently the American population is growing older, which means there is both a growing need for nurses as well as the implication that the workforce of nurses is also growing in age, roughly half of the nurses being 50 years or older. In most professions the reason for shortage is more directly related a lack of qualified applicants to the profession, in the case of nursing it is more directly related to the colleges and universities cannot meet demands of an increased enrollment. The inability to increase the enrollment is secondary to a lack of resources to both teach courses as well as issues related to student saturation at clinical sites (Fox & Abrahamson, 2009). A third contributing factor is very interrelated to nursing education is that nursing education has shifted from hospital-based diploma programs to university and college programs.
Once I started researching a career in nursing I realized that there were a lot more types of nurses then I had originally imagined. I have not decided on which field of nursing I would like to specialize in yet but I just imagine myself as a general nurse, working in a hospital setting. A Registered Nurse (RN) is not a doctor assistant; a RN gets to treat wounds, give IV’s and basically get to treat their own patients. Right now my main priority is to stay focused on taking all necessary steps to pursuing Nursing as a career.Gwendolyn Mink describes most Registered Nurses as working directly with the patients and their families. They are the families’ contact with the medical world, in the hospital and at the patients’ home.
Executive Summary – Middlefield is facing the high employee turnover, workforce shortage - especially of Nurses and low employee morale problems. Some of the findings about the causes of the problems are opening of the new hospital with better facilities and advanced technology for patient treatment and care, unavailability of quality instructors for nursing degree programs at universities. To tackle the problems, efficient use of existing Nursing workforce should be done in the short term. Whereas aggressive retention policies and increase in production of quality Nursing workforce should be long term strategies. Also Middlefield must ensure to increase the employee morale.
There is expected to be a change in the number of nurses working in hospitals. The reasoning to this is patients are being discharged earlier and more procedures are being done on an outpatient basis, both inside and outside of hospitals. “Some employers report difficulty in attracting and retaining an adequate number of RNs”( “Registered Nurses”). The RN workforce is slowly aging and there continues to be a lack of younger workers to fill these positions. As of right now there are more than 100,000 vacant positions for RNs.
Malpractice can be increasing because of a severe shortage of trained nurses, and it happened because of a few factors: nurses are required to work longer shifts; they can lead to fatigue and increase the risk for an error; also short Nursing courses providing degrees with no sufficient time to train nurses results in malpractice. Nurses who lack the experience and knowledge fail their duty, and when it happen not only them but also the hospital in which they work bear the consequences. Because most nurses are employees of hospitals, hospitals are frequently defendant in nursing malpractice cases. Another factor that contributes to nurse malpractice is miscommunication. Even though it is unintentional it can lead to tragedy.
Without superb time management, a nurse’s job will never get done. When implementing a new electronic health record (EHR), this disrupts the routine that nurses have worked hard to develop. According to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), U.S. hospitals are to become meaningful users of EHR (Kelley, Brandon, & Docherty, 2011). How can the disruption be minimized while implementing a new EHR as directed by the ARRA? Relative Advantage Relative advantage is when “the individual adopting the new innovation must see how it will be an improvement over the old way of doing things (Rogers, 2003).
This can be attributed to increase demands on nurses to produce more because there overworked coworkers have increased use of sick leave related to burnout. Patients and family members are beginning to realize the inadequate quality of health care services administered as the nurse is often very tired as the nurse to patient ratio surpassed safe patient care levels. The supply curve emphasizes change, allowing the health care industry to focus on a range of solutions indication how they will fix the shortage as the demand increases (Getzen, 2007). “The major factors and trends behind the growth in RN demand include: population growth, aging of the population, increased per capita demand for health care, and trends in health care financing,” (Bureau of Health Professions, 2004,
According to Nursing Today approximately 40,000 nurses report a back related injury yearly. Night shift seems to be at a higher demand for assistance with a lower staff patient ratio, therefore more injuries tend to occur then. Being a women and over-weight puts the RN at a higher risk for back injury as well. Lifting and other diseases can cause internal issues for RN'S. Internal risks are dangerous and some can be deadly for all in the medical field including Registered Nurses.