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Nurse staffing ratio and patient outcomes
Nurse staffing ratio and patient outcomes
Low nurse staffing and patient outcomes
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In the nursing world, situations and environmental factors can negatively affect patient outcomes. This nurse feels that errors mostly occur when staff is overworks and understaffed. When a nurse is in a hurry and there is no one to help out, errors occur. Another cause for a delay in treatment would be nursing high turnover rate. With high turn over rates come inexperienced nurses related to that specific unit. Staffing can influence the delayed in treatment in an emergency department. According to Windle (2008), registered nurses are the largest healthcare occupation with 2.5 million jobs. According to the study staffing, fatigue, stress, sleep deprivation, organizational culture, and shift work can lead to errors. Over 75% of registered nurses believe that nursing shortage presents a major problem for the …show more content…
Unstructured interviews ask questions in an informal and open fashion. The positive of this interview style allows for unassumed answers and a gain in understanding of the variable. Field notes are used as a record for the researchers observations. Group interviews allow a researcher to interview more than one person at a time. The positive of this interview style includes allowing a person’s answer to reflect responses based on the interactions of others. The negatives related to the interviewing method include trustworthiness, confirmability, transferability, and credibility. Trustworthiness is a negative because participants may feel that they cannot be honest and open unless the researchers interests are genuine. Confirmability is a negative because not every person always has consistence and repeatable decision-making processes. Transferability is a negative because the study can be applicable to another group or another setting. Credibility is a negative because researchers might not have confidence behind the results of the study (Rebar & Gersch,
There is a shortage of all health care professions throughout the United States. One shortage in particular that society should be very concerned about is the shortage of Registered Nurses. Registered Nurses make up the single largest healthcare profession in the United States. A registered nurse is a vital healthcare professional that has earned a two or four year degree and has the upper-most responsibility in providing direct patient care and staff management in a hospital or other treatment facilities (Registered Nurse (RN) Degree and Career Overview., 2009). This shortage issue is imperative because RN's affect everyone sometime in their lifetime. Nurses serve groups, families and individuals to foster health and prevent disease.
This report explores the importance of communication between nurses, providers and different departments play a crucial role in the safety of quality of patient care and their future health outcomes. When nurses give improper handoff’s the patient and the next nurse on shift will be left at a disadvantage. This can lead to further health complications and longer hospital stays for the patients and possibly death. The fairly new bedside shift report has been proven to catch mistakes during report and improve care in the hospital and for the future overall health of the client.
Nurse staffing ratios have been a topic of debate for many years. Inadequate staffing ratios can lead to patient, and staff endangerment, a decrease in patient and staff satisfaction, and a high turnover rate, along with employee burnout. Thus, sever staffing models have been implemented to aid with staffing rations, and federal and state requirements have been implemented. Although, nursing managers and leaders my approach nurse staffing differently, a professional approach should always be used to ensure satisfaction and safety.
Human factors are derived from construction and adapted to a system of development in health care by carefully examining the relationship between people, environment, and technology. The consideration of human factors acknowledges the capability or inability to perform a precise task while executing multiple functions at once. Human factors provide an organized method to prevent errors and create exceptional efficiency. Careful attention must be exercised in all levels of care such as the physical, social, and external environment. It is also vital to carefully consider the type of work completed and the quality of performance. Applying human factors to the structure of healthcare can help reduce risks and improve outcomes for patients. This includes physical, behavioral, and cognitive performance which is important to a successful health care system that can prevent errors. A well-designed health care system can anticipate errors before they occur and not after the mistake has been committed. A culture of safety in nursing demands strong leadership that pays attention to variations in workloads, preventing interruptions at work, promotes communication and courtesy for everyone involved. Implementing a structure of human factors will guide research and provide a better understanding of a nurse’s complicated work environment. Nurses today are face challenges that affect patient safety such as heavy workloads, distractions, multiple tasks, and inadequate staffing. Poor communication and failure to comply with proper protocols can also adversely affect patient safety. Understanding human factors can help nurses prevent errors and improve quality of care. In order to standardize care the crew resource management program was
Since the 1990’s, the interest in nursing and the profession as a whole has decreased dramatically and is still expected to do so over the next 10-15 years according to some researchers. With this nursing shortage, many factors are affected. Organizations have to face challenges of low staffing, higher costs for resources, recruiting and reserving of registered nurses, among liability issues as well. Some of the main issues arising from this nurse shortage are the impact of quality and continuity of care, organizational costs, the effect it has on nursing staff, and etc. However, this not only affects an organization and community, but affects the nurses the same. Nurses are becoming overwhelmed and are questioning the quality of care that each patient deserves. This shortage is not an issue that is to be taken lightly. The repercussions that are faced by both nurses and the organization are critical. Therefore, state funding should be implemented to private hospitals in order to resolve the shortage of nurses. State funds will therefore, relieve the overwhelming burdens on the staff, provide a safe and stress free environment for the patient, and allow appropriate funds needed to keep the facility and organization operational.
Staffing issues amongst the nursing profession has been a major concern. Safety of both nurse and patient is important. There is a strong correlation between having an adequate nursing staff and patient safety outcomes. The rise in the acuity of patients and shorter hospital stays has been linked to errors, nurse burnout, and patients sometimes feeling neglected. Patient satisfaction has become the major focus point since the change of our health care system today. Being able to find an optimal nurse- to- patient ratio has been an ongoing struggle in mostly all health care facilities. This paper will answer the PICO question, how is quality of care and patient safety affected in regards to nursing staffing and nurse patient ratios?
Poor staffing stresses every nurse and makes them despite what they once loved to do. Nurses are overworked and because of that they may not provide adequate patient care.
2016, p. 4573). Issues arising from nursing staff shortages are the impact of quality and continuity of care, organizational costs, and the effects it has on a nurse’s role in patient safety. According to Dhillon (2012), “areas of relationship between nursing workload and patient safety that show nursing workload that can, directly or indirectly, affect patient safety are time, motivation, stress and burnout fatigue, errors in decision making (attention), … and systemic/organizational impact” (p. 113). These diverse areas are all interconnected and result in downgrading the care provided to any client. For instance, errors arise when time is not permitted for nursing staff to double check medications. To augment, in British Columbia (BC) specifically, the average age of registered nurses is 44.5 (Canadian Nurses Association, 2016). This statistic supports the main focus of nursing shortages, as most nurses are progressing towards the ages of retirement; however, the demographic for inflow of new professionals is only nine percent (Canadian Nurses Association, 2016). According to Dhillon (2012), aside from lack of staff, the amount of in-patients admitted to hospitals currently is becoming overwhelming, increasing responsibility in shorter periods of time. These factors contribute to decrease in the overall provision of a patient’s
Nurse staffing is perceived as a major issue due to its effect on the safety and quality of patient care (Hinno, Partanen and Vehvilainen-Julkunen, 2011). Inadequate patient care could result in readmission. Readmission and emergency department visits by patients within 30 days of their discharge exhibits avoidable and costly outcomes (Weiss, Yakusheva and Bobay, 2011). The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has developed a financial penalty refusing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services for hospital reimbursement due to readmission (Berenson, Paulus and Kalman, 2012). Hospitals are now seeking to reduce patient readmission. The pertinence of this literature review is to unfold the effect of nurse staffing on patient readmission.
The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of nursing staffing ratios in the healthcare industry. This has always been a primary issue, and it continues to grow as the population rate increases throughout the years. According to Shakelle (2013), in an early study of 232,432 surgical discharges from several Pennsylvania hospitals, 4,535 patients (2%) died within 30 days of hospitalization. Shakelle (2014) also noted that during the study, there was a difference between 4:1 and 8:1 patient to nurse ratios which translates to approximately 1000 deaths for a group of that size. This issue can be significantly affected in a positive manner by increasing the nurse to patient ratio, which would result in more nurses to spread the work load of the nurses more evenly to provide better coverage and in turn result in better care of patients and a decrease in the mortality rates.
Emergency room nursing is an experienced registered nurse whose focus is providing critical care and dedicated treatment to patients that are either critically wounded or severely ill. These nurses specialize in rapid assessments and treatments of their patients conditions. It is with great responsibility that the Emergency Room Nurse work swiftly and responsibly under a variety of different circumstances. Due the stresses and required skill set of emergency room, nurses must do a good job of utilizing their abilities and must possess good time management skills, these demands ultimately leads to burnout.
Factors such as, heavy workloads, stress, job dissatisfaction, frequent medical errors, and intention of leaving the job are all common for nurses to experience, especially during the nursing shortage crisis. Not only do the nurses suffer during a shortage, but the patients ' health outcomes suffer even more. For instance, there are higher rates of infectious diseases and adverse patient outcomes, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), upper gastrointestinal bleeding, shock, pneumonia, prolonged hospital stays, failure to rescue, and mortality. As a result, this leads to higher re-admission rates for patients. Furthermore, high patient-to-nurse ratios cause heavy workloads due to an inadequate supply of nurses, an increased demand for nurses, a reduction in staffing and an increase in overtime, and a shortened length of stay for patients. Without the heavy workloads that nurses have to endure on a daily basis, there would more time for nurses to communicate more effectively with physicians, insurance companies, and patients and their families. Those heavy workloads are the result of hospitals reducing the nursing staff and implementing mandatory overtime policies just to meet unexpectedly high demands. Unfortunately, the nursing shortage has affected nurses ' mental and physical health. For example, the most common health concerns for nurses include cardiovascular health, occupational injuries and illnesses, and emotional and physical exhaustion. Therefore, safe-staffing ratios/levels have to become the main
Several consequences of high nursing workload have been proven to hinder the quality of patient care. Carayon and Gurses’s research (2008) indicates that heavy workload can contribute to errors, shortcuts, guideline violations, and poor communication with physicians and other providers, thus compromising the quality and safety of patient care. In addition, the research not only implies that patients may not receive proper care, but also they can experience less satisfaction with
Seidman (2012) describes the root of in - depth interviewing as “an interest in understanding the lived experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience.” The research method of interviewing has become a widely used technique for gathering different forms of methodical information about individuals in the social world. Interviews can be performed using one of two basic structures known as structured (closed questions) or unstructured (open questions). They can be framed in such a way by the researcher to retrieve the desired information from the respondent.
Staffing and scheduling means providing an adequate staff mix to meet the needs of the patients (Grohar-Murray & Langan, 2011). Nurse managers should know how to schedule and skill mix to provide adequate staffing and better patient care. Skill mix offers information about the appropriate utilization of nurses in terms of workload shared among RNs, LPNs and NAs (CHIN, 2013). The rationale for the change: Registered nurses are on the front line in all the hospitals for early detection and prompt intervention when patients' conditions deteriorate. Better patient outcomes depend on the number of skilled staff available to take care of the patients.