Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

MEMORANDUM

TO: Hospital Administrator

FROM: Director of Nursing

DATE:

SUBJECT: Hiring ten temporary nursing staff

I am writing to inform you of our department recommendation to increase the number of nursing staff during the tourist season. The increase in nursing staff is a temporary measure intended to cover the two-month busy tourist season between July and August. This is the busiest time for tourism in the county as it experiences its best weather bringing busy crowds and high rates. Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

Due to a sharp increase in the number of patients during this tourist season, and the results of data trends, I wish to express the need for ten additional temporary staff on the nursing care team. We need the additional nurses to help the current team ease the pressure of understaffing during this busy tourist season while better addressing patients’ needs in a timely manner without compromising care quality and safety.

ORDER  HERE A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

Over the next two months, we expect the number of patients to increase by 35%. This increase in number of patients is occasioned by the tourism season as the local communities have an influx of tourists from out of town. It will lead to high patient volumes for the nursing team, and high patient to nurse ratio. I want to ensure my team feels able to qualitatively and quantitatively handle all patient care needs. The facility needs adequate and safe levels of nurse staffing to function well and administer care both efficiently and safely. Adequate nurse staffing levels would ensure better care for the patients, increase patient satisfaction, prevent nurse burnout, and reduce nurse fatigue.

Adding the ten additional temporary nursing staff will:

• Help my nursing care team handle the daily patient volumes.
• Provide more individualized attention to each patient.
• Improve patient experiences and outcomes.
• Increase patient safety.
• Reduce understaffing, nurse burnout and turnover. Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper
• Improve facility finances.
• Ensure legal compliance.

We are confident that the ten additional staff will serve to make the nursing team more effective in providing care as required by the patients. I understand that we also need to consider how to remunerate these ten additional temporary nursing staff. Prior to communicating with you, I examines my nursing team’s annual budget and found there are some funds that can be relocated to help pay for the additional costs. In addition, the additional number of patients coming into the facility would increase revenues and allow for some of the funds to be allocated towards the staffing expenses without reducing profits.

High patient to nurse ratio leaders to nursing care errors, higher morbidity, and mortality rates. In addition, it leads to mismanagement of nursing personnel and resources, lack of follow through on care, extended shifts, and stretched personnel requirements. Inadequate nurse staffing is linked to high rates of infections, patient falls, medication errors, and even mortality. That is because inadequate staffing cause nurses to have too much work to juggle and cannot spend enough time on each patient. The nurses would not have enough time to provide medical care, emotional support, patient education, and comfort the patients and their family members, resulting in missed care (Haegdorens et al., 2019). Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

The high patient to nurse ratios cause nurses to get exhausted because of the shear amount of work they complete. Nurses would be fatigued with excessive workload, facing burnout, including both mental and physical symptoms. Other concerns for overworked nurses include weight gain, high blood pressure, depression, back pain, irritability, insomnia, and headaches (Membrive-Jiménez et al., 2022).

Having appropriate nurse staffing levels will reduce errors, increase patient satisfaction, and improve nurse satisfaction levels. Adequate nurse staffing increases patient safety as nurses have more time to monitor patients, administer medication and provide other critical care, thus helping to reduce risk of medical errors, fall and other adverse events (Haegdorens et al., 2019). In addition, adequate staffing improves patient satisfaction rates as nurses devote appropriate amounts of time with each patients and better cater to their needs, thereby providing a higher quality of care (Hong & Cho, 2021). Further, inadequate staffing leads to emotional and physical exhaustion among nurses as they are overworked, eventually causing fatigue and burnout. This can lead to high nurse turnover, further worsening the nurse staffing shortage and increasing costs associated with nursing staff recruitment and training. Adequate nurse staffing helps keep the nurses energized while preventing burnout (Membrive-Jiménez et al., 2022). The cost of hiring the additional ten temporary nurses is offset by the benefit of adequately staffing the health care facility. Moreover, adequate staffing improves facility finances by reducing costs associated with medical errors, extended hospital stay and readmissions, thus enhancing facility revenue by reducing likelihood of malpractice claims and increasing patient satisfaction (Griffiths et al., 2021). Furthermore, the state has enacted legislation that mandates minimum staffing levels in the facility, and adequate staffing is necessary to comply with these regulations and laws (Bartmess et al., 2021). Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

However, the funds that can be relocated from the nursing budget may not be able to completely cover the additional staffing costs. There may be a need to relocate funds from other areas of the facility. I know that these potential budgetary changes need to be discussed with other directors and department leaders, but I want to reach out to you about this issue first since you are our leader.

Taking the need for additional nursing staff into consideration is important because, without the additional nurses, our nursing care department may experience challenges, like compromised care safety and quality as well as work fatigue among the nurses. In saying this, I am concerned that understaffing during the tourist season may affect the quality of nursing services, patients’ satisfaction, and nurses’ turnover intentions.

In conclusion, adequate nurse staffing is essential for ensuring legal compliance, reducing health care costs, providing high-quality patient care, and retaining nurse staff. This creates the case for the facility to maintain optimal staffing levels and improve patient care. Engaging the recommended ten temporary nursing staff to cover during the busy tourist season presents an experienced and reliable team of nurses on staff to meet their patients’ needs.

To offset these issues caused by inadequate nurse staffing levels, I want to ensure that my nursing care team has the resources they need to keep the care quality, patient safety and nurse satisfaction at high levels. I appreciate your consideration for ten temporary staff members for my nursing team. Thank you, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with you soon. Please feel free to send any questions or concerns you have to me. Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

References

Bartmess, M., Myers, C. R., & Thomas, S. P. (2021). Nurse staffing legislation: Empirical evidence and policy analysis. Nursing forum, 56(3), 660–675. https://doi.org/10.1111/nuf.12594

Griffiths, P., Saville, C., Ball, J. E., Jones, J., Monks, T., & Safer Nursing Care Tool study team (2021). Beyond ratios – flexible and resilient nurse staffing options to deliver cost-effective hospital care and address staff shortages: A simulation and economic modelling study. International journal of nursing studies, 117, 103901. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2021.103901

Haegdorens, F., Van Bogaert, P., De Meester, K., & Monsieurs, K. G. (2019). The impact of nurse staffing levels and nurse’s education on patient mortality in medical and surgical wards: an observational multicentre study. BMC health services research, 19(1), 864. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-019-4688-7

Hong, K. J., & Cho, S. H. (2021). Associations between Nurse Staffing Levels, Patient Experience, and Hospital Rating. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 9(4), 387. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9040387

Membrive-Jiménez, M. J., Gómez-Urquiza, J. L., Suleiman-Martos, N., Velando-Soriano, A., Ariza, T., De la Fuente-Solana, E. I., & Cañadas-De la Fuente, G. A. (2022). Relation between Burnout and Sleep Problems in Nurses: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 10(5), 954.  Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

ORDER  TODAY

For the Business Writing you will assume the role of a Director of a business or facility and write a memorandum to your head administrator describing “events” or recommending changes that you feel need to be implemented at the facility to improve operations, efficiencies, outcomes, morale, etc. This writing should be based on experiences in your work environment and should involve MATERIAL issues. An event memorandum should incorporate the following concepts: (i) a description of the event, (ii) effects of events, and (iii) changes required by the event. A policy change memorandum should incorporate the following concepts: (i) a description of the policy change, (ii) how the change will be implemented, and (iii) hurdles that may need to be overcome. The memorandum must be typed with 1” margins, single spacing, a 12 point Times Roman font (including the header portion of the memorandum) and between 1 ½ and 2 pages in length. Exhibit A in the syllabus contains the format for the memorandum. You must use this format and may NOT use a different format, such as a Memo format with a 25-point Memorandum Heading. Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper

General Assignment Obligations

Students are expected to complete all assignments on or before the dates that they are due. Assignments submitted after the due date may not be accepted or may be subject to penalty. Acceptance of assignments after due dates is at the sole discretion of the course instructor and Dean. Any lack of completion of assignments and/or consistent lateness of assignment which leads a faculty member to judge that unsatisfactory progress is being made may result in the student being administratively withdrawn from the course and require the course to be repeated. This syllabus (including the referenced course calendar) and/or Canvas include due dates with regards to the completion of assignments. To the extent no written due date for an assignment is in the course. Nurse Staffing Legislation Essay Assignment Paper