Discussion Question One
The nursing shortage has led to the available nurses having to deliver their professional services for extremely long durations while working under stressful and unfavorable conditions. The service delivery in the healthcare sector is adversely affected where the level of performance and quality of care are compromised mainly owing to the few available nurses being subjected to fatigue, burnouts, and instances of job dissatisfaction. Nurses suffering in conditions and situations characterized by nursing shortage are often more prone to causing medical errors and mistakes in their lines of duty. Unfortunate outcomes that are linked to the shortage of nurses in the healthcare sector include alarmingly increasing rates of mortality and development of preventable complications by the patients, among others (Fagerström, 2012). This is an indication that the nursing shortage significantly hurts the enhancement of service delivery within the healthcare industry since trained and qualified nurses are likely to be discouraged and focus on venturing into other fields.
With a shortage of nursing staff, several measures can be incorporated to ensure the provision of quality care. One of such measures involves hospitals investing in the incorporation of changes that help in improving the physical environment and working condition for nurses. In this regard, the nurses are more likely to be empowered and motivated to perform their roles and responsibilities diligently and carefully despite being few (Beyers, 2015). Besides, the nurses should be inspired to be mindful of the culture and values espoused by the respective healthcare organizations as a way of ensuring that they stay focused on the professions despite the nursing shortage. Additionally, healthcare organizations should place more emphasis on investing in the training of more nurses and remunerating them accordingly to prevent instances of job dissatisfaction. Nurses need to feel inspired and supported in work by the employers and other professional bodies for them to deal effectively with the issue of nursing shortage in the healthcare sector (McNeese-Smith, 2017).
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Discussion Question Two
In the past decade, nurse practitioners have impacted the healthcare market in several ways. Nurse practitioners have previously played a critical role in the enhancement of preventive care, which has always been offered through the involvement of primary care physicians. Besides, the focus of nurse practitioner training involves ways of providing holistic and effective care to communities, families, and individual patients (King, 2014). In that regard, the nurse practitioner has managed to transform the healthcare market by placing more emphasis on the unique positioning of factors that influence the behavior of patients. This implies that individuals in the community are empowered to make changes in their lifestyles as well as making better health choices to assist in the prevention of chronic diseases.
Besides, nursing practitioners have transformed the healthcare market by keeping the costs contained. Studies that focused on comparing costs incurred in care services provided by nurse practitioners and those provided by physicians have established that healthcare cost has largely been contained in the last decade (Kaplan, 2015). This is because the nursing practitioners have also influenced growth in the number of convenient retail healthcare clinics which have proved to be effective in the provision of basic healthcare services. Presently, several such clinics are providing convenient and affordable alternatives to people who have travelled out of their towns. Nurse practitioners run most of these clinics, and they have considerably contributed to the expansion of access to basic healthcare services by people were previously unlikely to have access (Newland, 2016). To that extent, the healthcare market in the past decade has been transformed to become more competitive and centered more on addressing the concerns of patients and the respective communities.
References
Beyers, M. (2015). The new nursing shortage. JONA's Healthcare Law, Ethics, And
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Fagerström L. (2012). The impact of advanced practice nursing in healthcare: recipe for
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Kaplan, L. (2015). Building healthcare capacity. The Nurse Practitioner , 40 (11), 14-16. doi:
10.1097/01.npr.0000470358.23708.7a
King, D. (2014). Promoting nurse practitioner excellence. The Nurse Practitioner , 29 (10),
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McNeese-Smith, D. (2017). A Nursing shortage: Building organizational commitment
among nurses. Journal Of Healthcare Management , 46 (3), 173-187. doi:
10.1097/00115514-200105000-00008
Newland, J. (2016). Nurse managed health centers: Strengthening the healthcare safety
net. The Nurse Practitioner , 31 (2), 5. doi: 10.1097/00006205-200602000-00001
