Pertinent Healthcare Issue
Introduction
The system of healthcare delivery has significantly grown over the years, creating a significant array of issues that affect both the healthcare providers and the patients. Strong emphasis on crucial aspects of healthcare like service delivery, healthcare costs, technology, skills, practices for patient management, and leadership is essential in the improvement of healthcare quality. This paper seeks to address a significant national healthcare stressor or issue and look into its impact on my healthcare organization. It also addresses the strategies that the organization and other healthcare organizations put in use in managing the particular issue of healthcare.
Healthcare issue
The healthcare stressor that I identified to have a significant impact on the provision of healthcare is the issue of the workload increase for nurses that is majorly brought about by the shortages in nurses across the country(Bittner & Bechtel, 2017). This issue includes several factors like the condition of the healthcare consumer, the environment of work, nursing interventions, and provider characteristics, among others. The issues that further contribute to the already heavy workload that nurses get faced with are the decrease in the length of stay of patients, the low supply of nurses, the increasing demand for nursing practitioners, patients with complex conditions, and overtime increase. These issues add to the nurses’ work that is demanding, already eventually leading to nursing burnout. The result of this issue is that the ration of nurses to patients has been increasing. The number of patients that one nurse has to attend is significantly high, leading to major problems in the quality of care that is provided to the patients.
Article summary
The article by Qureshi et al., (2018) provides that the increase in the workload for nurses and the decline in the care quality is associated with the increased ratios of nurses to patients and the increased patient acuity. A study was conducted in the form of a simulation that was nurse focused, quantifying the effects of the changing ratios of nurses to patients. The study was conducted by using a model for demonstration in which the inputs included the real task data for patient care, the physical layout, and the process sequence for the flow of work. The outputs were inclusive of the workload of nurses in terms of the time of delivery of care, the tasks waiting in the queue, and the quality of care indicators that include care that is missed and missed time for care delivery. The study established that the quality of care decreased as the workload for nurses increased, and an increase in patient acuity was observed when the ratios of nurses to patients decreased. The article concluded that healthcare organizations could solve the issue of the workload of nurses by increasing the Acuity of patients, which will help significantly in decreasing the workload of nurses and thus improving the care quality.
Sun et al. (2017), establishes how the stressors in healthcare contribute to burnout in nurses. The article focuses on the specific stressor in this case, which is the increase in workload s that is brought about by the shortage of nursing personnel in the healthcare organization. The nurses experience burnout because of the long hours they have to work, and little time they have to rest, which is due to the high ratio of nurses to patients. The article established strong correlations between job stressors in nursing care and burnout in nurses. The relationship between the stressors in management and the amount of work that each nurse is supposed to carry out daily, can be stressful and contribute to burnout. According to the article, understanding how job stressors affect the delivery of care by nurses can help significantly in identifying the areas of intervention to improve the retention and recruitment of nurses. This will also help reduce the workload and reduce burnout among nurses.
Some organizations are addressing the issue of the increase in workload by providing training opportunities for the nurses to equip them with more skills in the provision of care. The vocational training will equip the nurses with skills in other fields of nursing so that they can be able to address the needs of a particular patient without the patient having to move through several departments as it saves more time and reduces the length of time that is taken for a patient to receive care.
Strategies to address the issue of workload increase
The issue of increase in workload gets addressed by some organizations by using the Jalowie Coping Scale to describe the strategies for coping, especially for the nurse and physicians in the emergency department. This scale gets used across the system of healthcare, and the individual items make an assessment of the range of strategies for coping that get used within the healthcare system (Xu et al., 2019). The coping behaviors addressed include being supportive, self-reliant, confrontative, optimistic, and evasive, among other behaviors. These behaviors get used by the nurses in coping with various stressors that they experience. In the case of workload increase, the most employed strategy is supporting each other in the sense that the nurse that has less workload helps those that have too much of it as they work together in providing quality care.
To address the impact of this workload increase on the organization, my organization employs the strategy of patient education to reduce the rate of return visits to the emergency room. Some of the return visits only increase workload due to overcrowding when there are issues that can be addressed without going back to the emergency room. This will have a positive impact on the organization as the nurses will be able to provide quality care to the patients due to the reduced workload. The impact of the issue of workload can be addressed by addressing the issue of the shortage of nurses. This can be done by making the nurses recruiters and compensating them for any referrals they make(Schlachter & Pieper, 2019). They can scout talents and recruit other nurses, bringing them into the organization, thus reducing the shortage. This will positively impact the organization as it will be able to acquire more personnel but negatively impact as the employees may fail to provide realistic and trustworthy information about the nature of the position.
Conclusion
The issue of workload increase in that practice of nursing is a problem that needs to be addressed by healthcare organizations across the world. This can be done by encouraging and inspiring more interest in the nursing profession for students getting into college to help solve the problem of shortages of nurses. Healthcare organizations should invest in long term professional training and education for nurses to boost the retention of nurses and equip them with skills necessary to occupy positions that will be left by the aging workforce and provide room for recruitment of fresh graduates. If these strategies are implemented, the issue of workload increase can be addressed.
References
Jansson, M. M., Syrjälä, H. P., &Ala-Kokko, T. I. (2019). Association of nurse staffing and nursing workload with ventilator-associated pneumonia and mortality: a prospective, single-center cohort study. Journal of Hospital Infection, 101(3), 257-263. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195670118306789
Qureshi, S. M., Purdy, N., & Neumann, W. P. (2018, August). Simulating the Impact of Patient Acuity and Nurse-Patient Ratio on Nurse Workload and Care Quality. In Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (pp. 528-535). Springer, Cham. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96098-2_65
Xu, H. G., Johnston, A. N., Greenslade, J. H., Wallis, M., Elder, E., Abraham, L. …&Crilly, J. (2019). Stressors and coping strategies of emergency department nurses and doctors: A cross-sectional study. Australasian emergency care, 22(3), 180-186. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2588994X1830054X
Sun, J. W., Bai, H. Y., Li, J. H., Lin, P. Z., Zhang, H. H., & Cao, F. L. (2017). Predictors of occupational burnout among nurses: a dominance analysis of job stressors. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 26(23-24), 4286-4292. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jocn.13754
Schlachter, S. D., & Pieper, J. R. (2019). Employee referral hiring in organizations: An integrative conceptual review, model, and agenda for future research. Journal of Applied Psychology. Retrieved from https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/apl0000412
Bittner, N. P., & Bechtel, C. F. (2017). Identifying and describing nurse faculty workload issues: A looming faculty shortage. Nursing education perspectives, 38(4), 171-176. Retrieved from https://journals.lww.com/neponline/Fulltext/2017/07000/Identifying_and_Describing_Nurse_Faculty_Workload.3.aspx