Nursing Case Study

In the 1990s many United State hospitals became progressively frantic to make money and stay open. Healthcare costs were on the rise and had been for many years. Insurance companies were starting to determine reimbursement rates and declined to pay for a lot of patient’s procedures. These private insurance companies began to gain power and altered the healthcare system. Due to the changes in reimbursements, hospitals began to cut costs by internally reconstructing their care, equipment, and even reducing the number of staff on each unit. People who were hit the hardest by these reductions were registered nurses. Nurses were required to take on higher patient workloads. The nursing role was even reduced and many tasks done by the nurse

She analyzes the doctor-nurse relationship, the lack of nursing staff members, power struggles between healthcare providers and hospital administrators, and the dismantling of nursing. I will be focusing on the hospitals’ inability to provide enough nursing staff members on a unit and the effects it has on patient care and safety. During my reading, I was drawn to Weinberg’s statement, “As their workload increased, nurses focused on the immediate tasks necessary to stabilize patients and were less able to focus on the “big picture” of caring for the patient (Wienberg,2003). This quote was talking about the nursing shortage on each unit and the inability for nurses to provide quality care to their patients. The nurses were focusing on the tasks at hand; for example, wound care or medication administration. Due to a lack of time, nurses were unable to provide extra care. Lack of time impeded the nurses’ ability to use their nursing skills to plan and execute the necessary care for patients. Nurses were starting to feel overwhelmed with the amount of work they had forced upon them and they felt bad for the patients. They knew the care they were providing was inadequate but they had no choice but to deal with what the hospital guidelines stated. In the end, the patient was the one who was suffering. The patient symptoms weren’t treated as well as they should have been and there were errors

I would advocate for my peers to enhance the nursing profession and would improve on patient care. The role of an advocate is to work on behalf of self and/or others to raise awareness of a concern and to promote solutions to the issue. Advocacy often requires working through formal, decision-making bodies to achieve a desired outcome (Tomajan, 2012). I would respect both nursing cohorts from the two hospitals to find common ground. Before we could take our solutions to upper management, we would first have to establish a mission statement that included our values and beliefs. BIDMC failed to form a unified nursing system and forced Deaconess nurses to adopt a new system. Once a unified system was established we could take our problems to upper management. Nurses need to stand together first before they can tackle the underlying issues of patient safety. We would need to communicate to the hospital administrators that patient satisfaction and safety is declining because we do not have the staff to provide quality care. If you hire more nurses to manage a unit you can increase the care provided and thus increase turnover and lower readmission. We would communicate to unit managers and upper management that spending money now would save money in the future. To do this, we would conduct quantitative and qualitative research by highlighting patient safety and