Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

Local Healthcare Economic Issue

The fiscal nurse staffing ramifications ensure that healthcare facilities offer top-notch patient services and can effectively allocate resources despite the changing healthcare environment. Hence, it is necessary for hiring managers to evaluate the existing complexities related to nursing workforce management, including these complexities’ long-term effects and financial implications on care quality. The following will describe how nurse staffing affects healthcare organizations as well as assess ways the issue influences our healthcare organization and the gap that causes the need to address the issue.  Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

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Health Economic Issue and Its Impact on the Specific Population

Inadequate nurse staffing in healthcare organizations is a large economic issue. Nationally, most healthcare organizations face challenges when assessing new applicants for open nursing positions caused by the effects of the undeniable nursing shortage (Brooks Carthon et al., 2020). Most researchers predict that the nurse shortage issue will worsen by 2030, considering that approximately one million nurses will retire and leave the profession. Such factors frustrate healthcare executives when recruiting nurses since the nurses’ retiring surge has significantly contributed to the current nursing shortage (Brooks Carthon et al., 2020). The economic issue related to inadequate nurse staffing revolves around the intensifying older citizens’ healthcare demand increases and early retirement. The impact of retiring nurses is that they have increased healthcare workers’ stress at work, resulting in burnout, thus contributing to the high turnover rates without proper replacement. Also, the growing body of evidence shows that acute care hospitals experiencing inadequate nurse staffing result in various adverse effects like medication errors, patient falls, in-hospital mortality, and hospital-acquired infections (Griffiths et al., 2020). The hypothesis is that healthcare organizations with inadequate staffing fail to achieve patient surveillance quality since nurses have limited time to spend with the patients when giving direct care. Hence, insufficient staffing rations care time and, in most cases, causes missed care that affects overall patient outcomes. That explains why healthcare organizations with inadequate staffing have higher case mortality and morbidity rates. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

The Rationale for Selecting The Healthcare Economic Issue

The main reason for selecting inadequate staffing as a healthcare economic issue is its effect on hospitals’ finances and the inability of these hospitals to meet the Triple Aim requirements. According to Han et al. (2021), hospitals struggle to meet the nurses’ demand and implement quality improvement projects to optimize care and increase positive patient outcomes. That is because the recruiting process has become competitive, and healthcare facilities have to increase these nurses’ wages to meet the demands of healthcare services. As a result, these hospitals are now prompted to offer the nurses better benefits, sign-on bonuses, and double their hourly pay, unlike the initial wage payment, to prevent high turnover. For instance, since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, most hospitals in the United States have paid nurses $100-$150 hourly to compensate for the extreme demand for nursing professionals (Han et al., 2021). Such factors hinder the healthcare organization’s ability to meet the patient’s needs and preferences, particularly in meeting the Triple Aim requirements that enhance the patient and nurse populations’ overall well-being. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

Ways The Healthcare Issue Influences Our Healthcare Organization

In our healthcare organization, the issue of inadequate staffing has affected the nurse-to-patient ratios. That is because one key burnout driver among nurses is related to the chronic stress contributed by patient overload (Griffiths et al., 2020). For instance, most nurses in our healthcare organization attend to many patients during their shifts, thus making it hard for them to meet all the patient’s needs and preferences. Consequently, these nurses find it hard to engage in patient surveillance, thus leading to increased cases of missed care and an inability to maintain optimal care outcomes (Han et al., 2021). For instance, there has been an increase in patient falls, leading to increased hospital stays and readmissions, affecting the healthcare reimbursement program. Also, due to the increased wages nurses demand, most healthcare organizations have poor nurse-to-patient ratios since most healthcare administrators are trying to leverage costs by having fewer nurse employees (Han et al., 2021). Such cases leave existing nurses with no option apart from sticking with the plan, which leads to severe consequences for the nurses and patient population, particularly on overall patient outcomes and increased dissatisfaction levels. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

The Gap That Causes the Need to Address the Issue

The gap contributing to the need to address inadequate staffing is that most hospitals have increased overtime pay to fill the insufficient nurses’ gap throughout the shifts. Also, insufficient staffing has contributed to increased hospital stays and the likelihood of patient readmission cases related to hospital-acquired infections and complications, affecting the patients and the healthcare organization’s sustainability and competitiveness (Griffiths et al., 2020). Another gap related to inadequate staffing is its contribution towards causing the nursing workforce to lose passion for nursing due to work overload, which makes most of them unable to balance their professional and personal lives. Such circumstances have reduced these nurses’ productivity and contributed to the increased medical errors, which risk the patients’ well-being and safety. Thus, there is a need to address comprehensively to enhance patient and nursing workforce satisfaction levels and achieve optimal care.

Conclusion

The main areas addressed by the paper are describing an economic issue, which, in this case, has been inadequate staffing and its impact on the the community, and the rationale for selecting the healthcare economic issue. Also, the paper has assessed ways the healthcare issue influences our healthcare organization and the gap that causes the need to address the issue. Generally, inadequate staffing has led to many healthcare organizations failing to meet optimal patient outcomes since they focus on meeting the existing nurses’ demands to prevent them from leaving. Hence, inadequate staffing in nursing serves as an economic healthcare issue since healthcare facilities must leverage their finances to meet the risky demand for nurses. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

References

Brooks Carthon, J. M., Hatfield, L., Brom, H., Houton, M., Kelly-Hellyer, E., Schlak, A., & Aiken, L. H. (2020). System-Level Improvements in Work Environments Lead to Lower Nurse Burnout and Higher Patient Satisfaction. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 36(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1097/ncq.0000000000000475

Griffiths, P., Saville, C., Ball, J., Jones, J., Pattison, N., & Monks, T. (2020). Nursing workload, Nurse Staffing Methodologies & Tools: a systematic scoping review & discussion. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 103(1), 103487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2019.103487

Han, X., Pittman, P., & Barnow, B. (2021). Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing. Medical Care, 59(Suppl 5), S463–S470.  Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

Background and Context

As a master’s level health care practitioner, you may sometimes be tasked with the need to complete a systematic evaluation as a way of improving your organization’s outcomes. In this week’s assignment, you will have a chance to practice these skills by completing a systematic evaluation of a unit, facility, or organization that you are familiar with in an attempt to identify the need to address the economic health care issue that you presented in your Week 3 assignment. This systematic evaluation is often referred to as a needs analysis. Understanding how to do a needs analysis will be key as you advance through your career in the health care environment.

Instructions

Be sure to address each main point. Read the performance-level descriptions for each criterion to see how your work will be assessed. In addition, note the requirements for document format and length and for supporting evidence. Review the assignment instructions and rubric to ensure you understand the work you will be asked to complete and how it will be assessed. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay

Overall, you will be assessed on the following criteria:

• Summarize your chosen economic issue and its impact on your work, organization, colleagues, and community.
  • Reiterate your rationale for pursuing this issue, as well as the gap contributing to it that you identified in your Week 3 assignment.
• Identify any socioeconomic or diversity disparities that exist with how your chosen economic issue impacts any particular groups or populations.
  • Use at least one piece of evidence to support this disparity (public health data, aggregated data from an organization, or other scholarly resources).
• Explain the findings of evidence-based or scholarly sources regarding the need to address your chosen issue and pursue potential change or implementation plans.
  • For example, if your implementation plan includes the need for increased staffing, you might want to research errors or patient falls that occurred as a result of high patient and low staff ratio in the literature.
  • Use at least four evidence-based or scholarly sources that are relevant to your chosen topic to support your explanation. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay
• Explain the predicted outcomes and opportunities for growth as the result of the proposed change or implementation plan.
  • Outcomes and opportunities for growth should focus on economic considerations.
• Convey purpose, in an appropriate tone and style, incorporating supporting evidence and adhering to organizational, professional, and scholarly writing standards.

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As a master’s level health care practitioner, you may sometimes be tasked with the need to complete a systematic evaluation as a way of improving your organization’s outcomes. In this week’s assignment, you will have a chance to practice these skills by completing a systematic evaluation of a unit, facility, or organization that you are familiar with in an attempt to identify the need to address the economic health care issue that you presented in your Week 3 assignment. This systematic evaluation is often referred to as a needs analysis. Understanding how to do a needs analysis will be key as you advance through your career in the health care environment. Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing Essay