Addressing Nursing Shortage at SLMC
Impact of Hiring Nursing Assistants to Address the Shortage
Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) play an essential role in providing basic care and ensuring patient comfort in medical facilities and long-term care homes. They are vital in reducing the nursing workload, thus allowing the overall improvement of care delivery. However, considering CNAs’ level of certification and educational path, they cannot be used as substitutes for registered nurses (RNs). Substituting RNs with CNAs reduces the skill mix of the nursing staff (Aiken et al., 2017). As a result, the quality of care and patient outcomes are compromised. This lead to adverse clinical consequences such as increased preventable deaths, higher mortality rates, lower patient safety, and poorer quality of care (Aiken, et al., 2017). Griffiths et al. (2018) found an adequate staffing level of CNAs to be effective in ensuring patient safety. However, higher or lower CNS staffing that the required level is associated with negative clinical outcomes (Griffiths et al., 2019). Furthermore, the study noted that CNAs cannot work as RNs’ substitutes. As such, the move to hire CNAs in place of RNs at SLMC will negatively affect patient care.
How to implement this change
The problem of nursing shortage at SLMC cannot be solved by hiring CNAs. Therefore, as a nurse administrator, I will help achieve this objective by recommending others with a mix of short-term and long-term solutions. First, considering that the organization is facing difficulties in hiring RNs, the problem may lie with its organizational culture. Therefore, the immediate action plan should be reviewing the current policies and creating a positive organizational culture (Mehdoava, 2017). These should involve reviewing compensation and benefits, diversity, discrimination, safety, and recruitment policies to ensure that they are inviting to all employees. The organization should offer competitive compensation packages, ensure job satisfaction, provide career growth opportunities, foster effective communication to encourage collaboration, and reduce incivility incidents (Mehdoava, 2017). Such changes will build a positive organizational culture that will promote nurses’ retention and attract new talents.
Additionally, SLMC management should also partner with a staffing agency to help recruit qualified nurses. Working with a reputable staffing partner can be an effective strategy for hiring nurses, especially from the international market, which provides a broader talent pool. This strategy can be accompanied by healthy onboarding practices to ensure that new hires effectively adapt to the organizational culture and become significant contributors to its goals.
Lastly, the long-term strategy is to form collegial partnerships with learning institutions. This involves initiating nursing promotion programs in high schools to encourage more students to join the profession (Mehdoava, 2017). Besides that, SLMC can work with nursing colleges to fund additional courses or facilities that will allow more students’ enrollment. In the wrong run, SLMC will have a reliable source for RNs.
References
Aiken, L., Sloane, D., Griffiths, P., Rafferty, A., Bruyneel, L., McHugh, M., . . . Sermeus, W. (2017). Nursing skill mix in European hospitals: a cross-sectional study of the association with mortality, patient ratings, and quality of care. BMJ Quality & Safety, 559-568. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/
Griffiths, P., Maroutti, A., Saucedo, A., Redfern, O., Ball, J., Briggs, J., . . . Smith, G. (2019). Nurse staffing, nursing assistants and hospital mortality: retrospective longitudinal cohort study. BMJ Quality & Safety, 28(8), 609-617. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/
Mehdoava, E. (2017). Strategies to overcome the nursing shortage (Doctoral dissertation). Walden University, Minneapolis, MI. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5933&context=dissertations