Nurse Staffing Case Study

“Because nursing salaries constitute some of the major drivers of labor costs in a healthcare organization, nurse leaders are increasingly challenged to tightly manage both staffing and scheduling within their designed cost centers (Yoder-Wise,p.256). It is understood that increased nursing staff will increase cost, but it is our job to provide quality of care and it makes it difficult to provide quality of care with a large patient load. Nurse staffing is measured by nursing hours per patient per day or the nurse to patient ratio. Understaffing is an issue that many nurses face. Those issues usually lead to nurses being burnt out, nurse shortages, medical errors, and patients being neglected or not receiving the best quality of care. The nurse

The plan was updated in June of 2014. The policy states that “ The Clinical Nurse Manager (CNM) are responsible for routine scheduling to allow for provision of quality patient care for every patient on his/her unit 24 hours a day” (Helen Keller Hospital,2014). The policy states that care levels from one to seven are assigned to each patient at the end of the shift and patient assignments are dispersed based on the care levels. Although our nurse manager does not follow the policy in fact I do not believe any nurse manager does for staffing. This assignment was difficult for me because I am a pre-operative nurse and so are all my co-workers we all left from medical units due to the issues of staffing. So instead the author decided to use comparison and contrast to develop this interview. The author chose pre-operative nurses with medical nursing backgrounds because she would not dare bother medical surgical nurses because they are understaffed and overwhelmed from patient care. For pre-operative nursing a certain amount of nurses are scheduled to work based on the number of surgical patients, so sometimes some nurses are sent home due to low census. On the medical surgical floor the amount of patients are just decided by the number of scheduled nurses. The requirement of care and skills are not taken into account when making out the assignment. My nurse manager makes a schedule for 28 days, she decides how

While interviewing Tanisha Poole she stated her current pre-operative position was staffed “extremely better”. Although she said that while working in the Day Patient Center it still is fast paced and demanding. Although she would never return to second central which is a medical surgical floor. The author asked did she feel as if she was able to deliver adequate patient care and her answer was much better than second central. Our interview then lead me to question is there a big difference from medical surgical services and surgical services staffing. She did not hesitate to say that now when she leaves from work she is able to relax, but going home from her old position she was always on the edge. She felt that she would get a call that she missed something or that she had caused harm to the patient. My last question was do you believe that your current employer is just not understanding the purpose of adequate staffing and her response was no she had the same problems as a travel nurse. Paige Pounders was another one of my interviewees she believes also that pre-operative nursing is better and there is adequate staffing based on the patient load. She also believes that it allows her to have more time to develop a personal relationship with her patients while providing