Running head: NURSING STAFF SHORTAGES Nursing Staff Shortages: Why is There a Problem and What Can be Done to Solve It? Wendy Allen Troy University NURSING STAFF SHORTAGES ABSTRACT Nursing staff shortage is a large problem in today’s healthcare environment. There are fewer nursing students as a result of their being fewer nurses. The population is aging, which is creating a larger demand for healthcare services. Healthcare organizations are finding it difficult to provide quality healthcare services in a timely manner due to the nursing staff shortages.
WHY ARE NURSES LEAVING? Nursing shortage has created a serious challenge in the health care delivery system, as there are not enough nurses to meet the patient’s demand. This shortage is a major concern in the health care system as it has a great impact on the quality of care to be provided. It was stated that “ the nursing workforce in the United States, that registered nurse (RN) shortage may exceed five hundred thousand by the year 2025” (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2010; Cipriano, 2006; United States Department of Health and Human Services,2002). Several factors have contributed to Registered Nurses (RNs) leaving clinical nursing practice.
Solutions for Nursing Personnel Shortages Executive Summary Senior Human Resource Management should adopt some changes in order to combat the current growing nursing/healthcare personnel shortage. Employees simply want to be heard and sympathized with. Nowadays the nursing shortage has caused many problems in the healthcare industry. First and foremost, the quality of care being provided to patients is declining due to the fact that there are not as many nurses to care for the patient appropriately. As a matter of fact, the workload being dumped on the employees is steadily increasing.
The nursing shortage is a major obstacle in health care industry today that threatens to decrease nurses productivity, efficiency, competency, quality, etc and in turn increase fatigue, burnout, nurse-to-patient ratios, etc. The goal of this paper is to discuss practice innovations that can improve the quality of health care and suggest practice interventions against those
Title: Reducing the numbers of medication errors by the nurses in health care system. Administration of medication is a key element of nursing care. Medications are an amazing discovery. They promote healing, reduce suffering and contribute to modern medical miracles. However, because thousands of new drugs have been developed recently, because the health care environment is increasingly complex, and because the patients are older and often sicker, there is increasing risk for medication errors in hospitals.
Prescriptive Authority and Nurse Practitioners Kaymie Chandler Johnston Austin Peay State University Healthcare Policy NURS 5001 February 7, 2013 Prescriptive Authority and Nurse Practitioners There are many healthcare policy issues that affect nurse practitioners today and in the future. The Affordable Care Act is to add approximately 32 million Americans to the roles of the insured at a time when there is a shortage of primary care providers. (Fairman, Rowe, Hassmiller, Shalala 2011). Nurse practitioners will be part of the solution for this shortage, but with ever tightening restrictions on the care that they can provide, it will prove more and more difficult to ease the strain on an already over-burdened system. One policy that is especially concerning and confusing to many advanced practice nurses and future advanced practice nurses is prescriptive authority.
Burnout in nursing is one of the major problems that occur due to the shortage of staff members, variable shift works, dissatisfaction and stressors of workplace that can lead to physical, emotional, social and long-term career effects to the nurses. However, it can be resolved by following a problem focused copping mechanism and positive emotion focused coping mechanism. Besides this, working as a team at work place and practicing healthy life style also can help in resolving burnout. Causes of Burnout in Nursing The demand of nurses is increasing at a great pace all over the world. No matter how many nurses a country produces every year, there is always a shortage of workers.
Not to mention the fact that as the years pass, there will be an increase of required patient care as people are only growing older and sicker. A generation of baby boomers are on the peak of their retirement (Olshansky, E. 2010) which means that an increased supply of nurses is imperative to ensure client safety and care. The more patients a nurse has to care for, the less efficient care the patient will receive. Having to care for more patients at a time, than the ideal number, would then become a huge barrier to the therapeutic nurse-client relationship. This could potentially remove the caring aspect from the nursing profession (Melnechenko,
Generally the nurses experiences of care for the dementia patient in the acute care setting was one of uncertainty, due to the fact the nurses felt they had a specific lack of knowledge. Nurse’s knowledge and education As the population grows and there’s an increase in the number of dementia patients, nurses in the acute care setting need to be skilled and educated to support patients with dementia as stated by (Archibald & Cunningham 2006 p.55I). Erikson & Saveman (2002) described the lack of specialized education for nurses in regards to dementia patients in the acute care setting. This is of particular concern as there are many demands on nurses in the acute care setting and can influence the nature of the care they give. According to Nolan (2006, p.213) nurses had concerns of
Since the late 1980’s the demand for nurses has been escalating as the numbers of nurses in the field have dropped (Buerhaus, 1987). A quick fix to the nursing shortage has been to bring nurses to the U.S. from abroad and in recent years nearly one-third of new nurses were not born in the United States (Herbst, 2007). But critics say this is only a short term fix to a long-term problem and the reasons for the nursing shortage must be addressed. When hospitals fill their nursing needs with foreigners who will work at lower wages they make their investors happy with their returns, but they also prevent the needed wage hike that would draw more Americans into the field and solve the shortage in the future (Herbst, 2007). Below par wages are not the only reason nursing positions are hard to fill, nurses have a job that requires physical as well as mental strength and their employers must provide good working conditions to retain nurses.