Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion

Introduction

Healthcare organizations rely greatly on human resources to ensure quality, safe, and effective service provision to their clients, the patients. Patient safety is of utmost importance to any healthcare organization. On the other hand, healthcare resources including human resources and financial resources are limited resulting in competing health needs (Agyeman-Manu et al., 2023)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion. This paper focuses on competing health needs that impact nursing staffing ratios and some of the health policies to combat these competing needs.

Competing Needs Impacting Nursing Staffing Ratios

One major competing health need, which affects nurse staffing is healthcare quality. Nurses are ethically and legally required to provide high quality services that ensure the client’s safety. While this may be the aim of every nurse and advanced nurse practitioner, various limitations occur that affect their service delivery. This includes but is not limited to stressful work environments due to the understaffing and overworking of available workers (McHugh et al., 2021)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion. Therefore, quality and quantity of workers should go hand-in-hand despite limited resources. This is however not usually the case, as one is sacrificed in favor of the other.

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Another competing need is the organization’s responsibility to ensure continuing career growth for its workers. Working nurses may require support from the organization to advance their careers and knowledge through further education. This is necessary to ensure the continued growth of an individual and the organization at large by promoting the development of human resources (Adhikari & Smith, 2023)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion. However, organizations may be limited in terms of resources needed to support this, thus it affects staffing.

Organizational Policy that May Influence the Healthcare Issue

Organization policies are meant to address healthcare needs to ensure the well-being of its workers while advocating for patient safety and satisfaction. One policy in our organization that influences nursing staff ratios to ensure adequate staffing is the staffing mandate to ensure a minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratio in various hospital units (Han et al., 2021)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion. This policy allows for the development of a staffing plan based on the nursing skills and the patient’s needs. This is a good policy as it ensures that units with more patients get more nurses to balance needs and workforce.

Critique of the Organization Policy

Although this policy seeks to ensure the nurse-to-patient ratio allows for better patient care and well-being of nurses, it can be difficult to determine the correct nursing methods to use, to ensure the nurses’ satisfaction, and patient safety and outcomes. The advantage is that it ensures nurses are not overworked and patients receive quality care (Han et al., 2021)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion.

This policy may not be completely bulletproof as it is challenging to determine the required nurse-to-patient ratios in every facility. This may leave other units understaffed, thus affecting patient safety and healthcare equality. Another challenge arising from the mandated nursing staffing ratios is that making the data on which hospitals have the best nursing staffing makes patients prefer some healthcare facilities (McHugh et al., 2021). This makes healthcare particularly expensive, especially for the lower socioeconomic status individuals who may not be able to choose. On the other hand, it also leads to overcrowding of these facilities thus compromising care.

Change Recommendation to Balance the Competing Needs

Other policies that have been tried to curb nurse staffing include the establishment of a staffing committee consisting of RNs and other nurses and the formation of public reporting of hospital nurse staffing. However, the only change that will solve the problem of staffing is the training and employment of more nurses to ensure patient needs are met. This can be done by offering competitive salaries to nurses, giving bonuses, and other incentives to motivate workers units (Han et al., 2021)Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion. This remains an important area of study to ensure careful evaluation of competing health needs before forgoing one important need for the other.

References

Adhikari, R., & Smith, P. (2023). Global nursing workforce challenges: Time for a paradigm shift. Nurse Education in Practice, 69, 103627. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2023.103627

Agyeman-Manu, K., Ghebreyesus, T. A., Maait, M., Rafila, A., Tom, L., Lima, N. T., & Wangmo, D. (2023). Prioritising the health and care workforce shortage: Protect, invest, together. The Lancet Global Health, 11(8), e1162-e1164. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(23)00224-3

Han, X., Pittman, P., & Barnow, B. (2021). Alternative approaches to ensuring adequate nurse staffing. Medical Care, 59(Suppl 5), S463-S470. https://doi.org/10.1097/mlr.0000000000001614

McHugh, M. D., Aiken, L. H., Sloane, D. M., Windsor, C., Douglas, C., & Yates, P. (2021). Effects of nurse-to-patient ratio legislation on nurse staffing and patient mortality, readmissions, and length of stay: A prospective study in a panel of hospitals. The Lancet, 397(10288), 1905-1913. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(21)00768-6 Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion

Tamata, A. T., & Mohammadnezhad, M. (2022). A systematic review study on the factors affecting shortage of nursing workforce in the hospitals. Nursing Open, 10(3), 1247-1257. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.1434

DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES

Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly.

Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice.

Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization.

To Prepare:

• Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected.
• Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs.

The Assignment (1-2 pages): Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion

Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Add a section to the 2-3 page paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following in 1-2 pages:

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• Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
• Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
• Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.
• Due to the nature of this assignment, your instructor may require more than 7 days to provide you with quality feedback. Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay Discussion