Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

Quite often, nurse leaders are faced with ethical dilemmas, such as those associated with choices between competing needs and limited resources. Resources are finite, and competition for those resources occurs daily in all organizations. For example, the use of 12-hour shifts has been a strategy to retain nurses. However, evidence suggests that as nurses work more hours in a shift, they commit more errors. How do effective leaders find a balance between the needs of the organization and the needs of ensuring quality, effective, and safe patient care? In this Discussion, you will reflect on a national healthcare issue and examine how competing needs may impact the development of polices to address that issue.Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

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To Prepare: Review the Resources and think about the national healthcare issue/stressor you previously selected for study in Module 1. Reflect on the competing needs in healthcare delivery as they pertain to the national healthcare issue/stressor you previously examined. By Day 3 of Week 3 Post an explanation of how competing needs, such as the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients, may impact the development of policy. Then, describe any specific competing needs that may impact the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected. What are the impacts, and how might policy address these competing needs? Be specific and provide examples. *The healthcare issues used previously is Catheter associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs)Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues

Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) are a significant challenge for patients and healthcare organizations, considering a significant number of patients develop this infection during hospitalization. Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) are urinary tract infections, which develop in patients with indwelling bladder catheters that are predisposed to bacteriuria, which is bacteria in urine (Behzadi, 2019). In most cases, patients who develop this infection have an indwelling catheter for more than two days. The bacteria enter the bladder through the catheter lumen during the insertion process. A biofilm develops around the catheter, through which the bacteria enter the urinary tract, limiting the mechanical flow of urine. Common symptoms include fever, anorexia, flank pain, malaise, or a sign of sepsis in their urethra. This infection is highly common among inpatients with indwelling catheters, which raises concerns about the available resources in the hospital and the competing needs.Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

CAUTIs are a healthcare issue that raises concerns about the competing needs in a hospital and how they could affect policy development within a healthcare organization. For CAUTIs, one of the prevention measures that a healthcare organization could implement to reduce the incidence of infection among the patients would be to have the nurses change the catheters more often. This process is referred to as intermittent catheterization, which is the insertion of the catheter several times a day to empty the patient’s bladder (Behzadi, 2019). One of the contributing factors for developing a CAUTI, as mentioned earlier, is having an indwelling catheter for more than two days. Therefore, one of the solutions is to have the catheters frequently changed (Imama, 2020). This measure requires that nurses pay more attention to patients and offer this nursing care more often than before. This solution raises the concern of a competing need, which is the nurses’ labor and time, which will require additional effort or time for them to attend to patients who require such care.Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

These changes translate to additional hours at work, additional workload, and the need to increase nurses’ pay based on these new roles. To address this competing need, the hospital management needs to evaluate its reward system and provide nurses with additional income or increase the number of nurses on shift, to lighten the workload and prevent nurse burnout. The human resource personnel will be required to formulate new work schedules and payment systems for nurses, to ensure that nurses perform their roles without burnout and that patients have reduced the incidence of CAUTI given the additional nursing services they would receive with the new policy in place (Hamilton, 2018). Overall, the new policies would be nurse income increment or increase in the number of nurses in the hospital to cover the additional workload.

Another competing need arising from this healthcare challenge in hospital settings is the availability of catheters and the additional costs required to procure this equipment. Additionally, the costs of the bladder catheterization are high, which means that the hospital requires additional resources to cover these costs, especially if patients use their insurance plans to offset their medical bills (Hamilton, 2018). The financial burden caused by the CAUTIs is costly to the hospital. Additionally, the solution to this healthcare challenges presents additional costs for the hospital, which include purchasing more catheters, since the solution is to have them changed more often. Therefore, this solution would affect hospital policy in terms of the procurement of catheters and budgeting for this additional equipment.Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.