Difficult situation due to unsafe staffing
The healthcare system has been experiencing a shortage of nurses for two decades. According to Haddad & Toney-Butler (2019), the staff shortage is caused by increased patient complexity, an aging workforce, cost-cutting decisions, and an increase in the incidence of chronic illnesses in the US. Nurses’ shortage has led to stressful working conditions for nurses and poor patient outcomes. This is because staffing affects the ability of nurses to deliver safe and quality care.
In my experience in the maternity department, we were only three nurses on duty, and we were to attend to thirty two mothers who had come to seek delivery services. Each of us was allocated to ten mothers. In my case, I delivered one mother, and the next mother was also fully dilated. After delivering the first woman, the Apgar score of her baby was six at one minute. The baby required resuscitation. The second woman was also crowning.
Honestly, it was the worst day in my nursing practice because I had an emergency and needed to provide nursing care to the next woman on the line. I felt overwhelmed. However, I shouted for help and began resuscitating the distressed baby. My colleague, who was monitoring the partograph of another woman, came and assisted me in delivering the woman who was in the second stage. If I were to face the same situation again, I would first instruct the woman who was in the second stage to breathe in and bears down with every contraction as we wait for a nurse who comes to help the mother to deliver.
Mandatory staffing policies require that the nurse-patient ratio in maternity and delivery is 1:2 (Shin et al. 2018). This would help in the above case because each of us would have one patient who would be in the early first stage of labor and the other one in active labor. The organization I work for employed fifteen more nurses to solve nurses’ shortage issues, thus reduce medical errors and ensure patient safety.
In conclusion, healthcare organizations should strive to increase the number of nurses who are considered the heart of healthcare. If this were done, patient safety would be assured, and the problem of burnout and turnover among nurses would be solved.
References
Haddad, L. M., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2019). Nursing shortage. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.
Shin, S., Park, J. H., & Bae, S. H. (2018). Nurse staffing and nurse outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nursing Outlook, 66(3), 273-282.