Importance of Adequate Staffing
Competing needs such as the healthcare workforce, the needs of the patients, and inadequate hospital resources may massively impact the formulation and development of policy since the competing demands should be aligned with the agenda that the policy advocates for in the health care setting. For instance, an approach that addresses staffing of nurses in a healthcare setting needs to meet the workforce and patients' needs while ensuring the minimization of financial costs. According to Van Den Oetelaar et al. (2016), the effective deployment and utilization of the healthcare workforce is significant in ensuring efficient healthcare services delivery in cost, quality, and quantity. The shortage of employees can lead to adverse effects such as low quality of care (Livanos, 2018). Moreover, it could be compromising the patients' safety, burnout of the nurses due to the work overload, and longer waiting times for patients due to the shortage of staff causing preventable deaths.
Ways of Achieving Balance in Healthcare Staffing
Health care organizations have to explore various schemes of maintaining the right balance despite the staff's expertise and size and the needs of the patients to ensure safe care and quality care along with outstanding services to the patients while maintaining sustainable operating costs (Singh Dhaliwal, 2018). There should be an optimal balance of the nursing capacity with the patients' needs, which can be realized through a fair and sensible distribution of nurses in units and creation of a manageable workload among the nursing staff.
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Conclusion
There is no doubt that the workload influences both the needs of the staff and the patients and the organization's resources. Healthcare workers burnout causes poor patient outcomes and errors, leading to diminished quality of care provided in the hospital and sometimes causing nurses to leave their jobs. High nursing staff turnover has led to increased costs for employing temporary workforce and training new nurses in the workforce (Van Den Oetelaar et al., 2016). In some instances, a policy might be used in addressing the competing needs through an optimal patient to nurse ratio, which is crucial for nursing staffing in health care organization and improvement of the care outcomes for the patients.
References
Livanos, N. (2018). A broadening coalition: Patient safety enters the Nurse-to-Patient ratio debate. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 9(1), 68-70.
Singh Dhaliwal, J. (2018). Workforce planning: How we think about the impact of organizations on outcomes. Australian Journal of General Practice, 47(8), 519.
Van Den Oetelaar, W. F. J. M., Van Stel, H. F., Van Rhenen, W., Stellato, R. K., & Grolman, W. (2016). Balancing nurses' workload in hospital wards: study protocol of developing a method to manage workload. BMJ Open, 6(11).
