Understaffing

Understaffing

The problem of understaffing at XYZ hospital fails to meet quality and regulatory requirements as it prevents health professionals from putting enough concentration on patient care. Since the health facility has limited healthcare personnel, it is strained on human resources. Most of them take longer shifts to cover the significantly large amounts of work within. As a result, they experience significant levels of fatigue, which leads them to burnout. Therefore, they fail to provide patients the necessary levels of care they need.

The problem creates significant challenges. One of them is that the health facility cannot attend to emergencies properly and with the levels of promptness desirable. It also creates conflicts among employees as some of them become inundated by the high levels of stress and burnout they experience. Further, the exhaustion makes the health personnel makes them fail to put enough levels of concentration into their work and, thereby, cause errors in the process. For instance, some of them provide either wrong prescriptions or dosages of drugs.

1. Evidence-Based Support

Statistics show that the nurse-to-patient ratio in most US hospitals is 1:4. The index is much higher than the desirable 1:2 as prescribed by the WHO (Welton, 2007). Therefore, the case shows that health professionals in most US hospitals have to contend with a huge workload, which generally impacts negatively on their ability to assure their patients’ high-quality care and earn their trust.

This problem has been utilized in the past by using Electronic Medical Records, which reduces the workload of health professionals and eases the process of sharing information among health professionals (Gregory et al., 2017). As a result, few of them can attend to a large number of patients.

The desirable accreditation standards, safety standards, compliance standards, and quality initiatives pertain to ensuring that enough qualified health personnel are hired within the health facility (Barnett et al., 2019). The strategy will be essential in enabling them to create quality in their practice. These standards promote a culture of safety within the department by ensuring that there is enough personnel to ensure that patients are provided the best form of care and are not exposed to avoidable risks.

References

Barnett, A., Winning, M., Canaris, S., Cleary, M., Staib, A., & Sullivan, C. (2019). Digital transformation of hospital quality and safety: real-time data for real-time action. Australian Health Review, 43(6), 656-661.

Gregory, M. E., Russo, E., & Singh, H. (2017). Electronic health record alert-related workload as a predictor of burnout in primary care providers. Applied clinical informatics, 8(03), 686-697.

Welton, J., (September 30, 2007). Mandatory Hospital Nurse to Patient Staffing Ratios: Time to Take a Different Approach. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 12 (3), Manuscript 1. DOI: 10.3912/OJIN.Vol12No03Man01