Top Five issues in Nursing
Nurses take part in an essential role in the healthcare sector, providing care to the sick besides fulfilling leadership roles at clinics, health systems, and other health care institutions. However, being a nurse has its challenges since it’s a demanding career that calls for a lot of devotion and commitment.
The five significant issues facing nurses should be; shortage of Staffing, Long working hours, Workplace hazards, Compensation, and workplace violence.
In this argumentative essay, the issue of shortage of staff forms the primary argument in this discussion.
Short-staffing in healthcare settings is a significant problem for nurses. According to an article “5 of the biggest issues nurses face today”, by Kelly Gooch, a 2017 study done by AMN Healthcare, it reveals 72 percent of CNOs (Chief Nursing Officer Summit). With its documentation either being a reasonable, significant, or severe shortage of nursing at their healthcare settings. Besides, many are confident that the scarcity of staffing would get worse by the year 2022. In General, the Statistics of U.S. Bureau of Labor approximates over 1 million registered nurses will be required by that year because of professional growth in addition to replacement hiring. It is, however, worth noting that some research shows disparity amongst the state’s main metropolitan zones, with some areas facing shortages of nurses while other parts are facing surpluses.
In honest opinion, this issue of shortages of nurses in Hospitals or healthcare institutions can result in limitations in providing the care that nurses should provide for their patients. As Kelly suggests, in situations with scarcities of staff, nurses are generally concerned since it means that they lack enough time to offer the care they consider necessary for patients and also families.
In an interview with Kelly, Pamela F. Cipriano, President of the American Nurses Association, stated that “Nurses may not feel like they are doing enough, which causes dissatisfaction and burnout. We call this moral distress”.
In support of this, someone would strongly argue that this feeling can be emotionally, mentally, and physically damaging when always nurses think that they can’t give the care they feel is necessary. Additionally, nurses consider staffing problem as a deterrent to the safety of the patient and also a cause of many errors, higher morbidity as well as death rates in hospitals. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
Anybody would agree to the fact that, if staffing is insufficient, it becomes a threat to patient health and safety, and brings about the more significant complication of caregiving. Furthermore, it affects the health of nurses and their safety during work by aggregating fatigue in addition to the rate of injury.
A Minnesota Department of Health review of literature discovered, without a doubt, a piece of substantial evidence connecting shortage of nurse staffing levels to increased patient death, failure to save a rushed in, and downfalls in the hospital. There was similarly solid proof that other health care procedures, for example, errors in drug administration, lost nursing care, and duration of patient stay, are connected to lower levels of nurse staffing.
Besides, the Health Affairs published a study and found out that short staffing can impede the efforts of nurses to conduct procedures of care effectively. Researchers established that infirmaries that have higher nurse staffing had low chances (a 25 percent), of being fined in the Affordable Care Act’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program in comparison to other alike hospitals that have lower staffing(Kelly 2015).
Short staffing is a subject matter of both career as well as an individual issue for our nurses today. As a fact, problems associated with staffing levels, among others, such as inequitable assignments, are among the main reasons nurses might resign a hospital job (Lögde 2018).
The reason beyond unionized nurses frequently bringing up the issue of staffing levels whenever they are in the center of negotiating a contract is nothing but these effects the subject has had on them daily at work. For example, tons of nurses demonstrated on Aug. 3, 2015, outside of General Hospital of St. Petersburg over staffing levels plus wages. Moreover, nurses, as well as other healthcare personnel, organized to hold a post outside Renton, Wash.-based Valley Medical Center earlier before the demonstrations at St. Petersburg over the issue of staffing levels.
To address the issue of shortages of nurses, the Health Policy Commission back in 2013, unanimously sanctioned a directive on staffing of nurses in intensive care units throughout Massachusetts. The rules obligated that nurses in intensive care unit hospitals, together with hospitals, managed and run by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, should have an allocation of up to two patients at a particular moment. The rules governed all ICUs, comprising individual units for patients with burns, children, and premature newborns.
In support of this argument, the authors of the NCBI Journal, Lisa and Tammy, in the article “Nursing Shortage,” affirm that the nursing career is facing shortages of staff because of a lack of possible educators, high turnover, besides unbalanced dissemination of the workforce. The authors further stated that the causes linked to the shortage of nurses are many and are problems of great concern. They the authors explore the reasons behind this significant problem in nursing giving them as follows;
Aging Population; the Population is getting old, and so it enters the age of increased want for health care services. At present, the U.S. contains the most significant number of people who are over 65 years. Coming 2029, the final baby boomer age group will attain retirement age, bringing about a 73% rise in Americans who are 65 years and older. ( In 2011, they were 41 million which raised to 71 million in 2019).
So as the Population grows older, the requirement for health care services increases. In a hone’s view, older people do not naturally have one illness that they are coping with or managing, but regularly they have a swarm of diagnosis and co-illnesses that needs them to seek medical care. Treating these lasting ailments can strain the workforce.
Aging Workforce. Like the populations they serve, the nursing workforce is also aging. There are currently approximately one million registered nurses older than 50 years, meaning one-third of the workforce could be at retirement age in the next 10 to 15 years. This number includes only the nurse faculty, and that poses a particular problem on its own. It is evident that the Nursing faculties are facing a significant challenge, a shortage, and this usually consequences to admission limitations, restricting the number of nurses that a school of nursing can produce.
Nurse Burnout; Another reason the authors explore as among the causes of shortage of staffing is that many nurses after they have graduate and start working and soon determine that the occupation is not what they initially thought it could be. So some may work a short time, go through burnouts, and leave the career.
Violence in the healthcare setting also plays a part in the nursing scarcity; there is always a threat of emotional and physical mistreatment. If this adds up to an existing tense and hectic working atmosphere, Job fulfillment and also work effort are going to be negatively affected since the bodily and emotional abuses take a toll on the welfare of the nurses physically as well as emotionally. It could make the argument that the Emergency section and psychiatric nurses are at a higher risk because of the Population of their patients. According to Lisa and Tammy, a research done in Poland in 2008 to around 2009 settled that nurses represent the most vulnerable occupation to violence in the place of work concerning a healthcare environment.
In conclusion, the amounts of nursing shortage can indeed differ significantly depending on the area of the country. More significant deficiencies have been observed in different sections depending on the field of nursing. Some parts suffer real deficits, for example, critical care nurse, maternity, and delivery. As seen in this essay, shortages of nursing harm the delivery of quality care systems to patients, affecting nurse’s health through fatigue and also burnouts. It is, therefore, upon health care organizations to be creative in making sure the needs of nurses are put into consideration while at the same time providing the paramount and safest health care to the patients. A working environment that empowers and inspires nurses is essential to revitalize and also sustain the nursing labor force.