Throughout the past few years, hospitals in United States have been facing cyclical shortage of nurses. The shortage has been caused by a broad set of factors in relation to retention and recruitment (Snavely, 2016). Nurses cite that they experience stress related burnouts as well as more time used in non-nursing tasks (Zboril-Benson, 2016) . Too much workloads, long shifts and overtimes are linked to errors and generally poor quality of care to the patients. Due to the strained conditions at work, many nurses are leaving the healthcare workforce. As a result, the shortage of nursing is worsened by the conditions making the process of recruiting new nurses even more difficult. To this end, the understaffing of nurses in hospitals has raised concerns over the quality, consistency and the cost of care provided.
In my 5-year nursing career of being an oncology nurse at Deinaff Hospital in New York, I have had experiences of handling more than double the recommended workload. I recall one night shift when I was alone on duty with over ten patients to attend to. I worked continuously up to 4 AM. Thinking that I had just completed my duty, the last patient tripped over the edge and I felt unable to handle all the patients alone. I was fatigued and could not promptly attend to the patient’s needs. I can recall several times when it became impossible to provide proper care to the patients because we were understaffed.
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In hospitals, many things are likely to snowball and patients are often at a high risk in their situations. In another situation, I had several patients to attend to. One patient was having a sudden hemorrhage, another one was complaining of chest pains while another was choking due to stroke. It was very difficult for me to handle all those patients at the same time since their situations were all critical. Often times we are forced to make uncomfortable assessments on a day-to-day basis since the hospital administrators do not want to invest in staffing of more nurses. This issue affects not only our patient care deliver but it also affects our physical and mental health causing stress and other poor outcomes.
My experience and that presented in the case study are similar since both involve the issue of understaffing of nurses. The nurses in the study complain of working extra shifts and being given a mandatory overtime for the all month. The understaffing affects their quality of care and may lead to an increased rate of infections. The nurses feel that they have to work together in ensuring that they are practicing safely to avoid fatigue due to understaffing. Studies indicate that there is a correlation between understaffing of nurses and the adverse outcomes, especially higher rates of mortality ( Glette, Aase & Wiig, 2017 ). Therefore, adequate levels of staffing are vital antecedents to quality care among nurses.
Overworking of nurses in hospitals has been a major issue in the American Healthcare System. The workloads mostly result from the shortage of nurses, more demand for nurses, a decrease in patient length of stay, longer shifts as well as reduced staffing. There are significant consequences associated with the understaffed nurses. Research shows that the heavy nursing work load as a result of understaffing affects the safety of patients adversely ( Twigg, Gelder & Myers, 2015). Furthermore, it affects the job satisfaction of nurses, which contributes to nursing shortages and high turnover. Besides the higher patient acuity, prospects and factors of work system contribute to the workload among nurses. Thus, understaffing of nurses has serious outcomes on the patients’ safety as well job satisfaction and the turnover of the nurses.
In conclusion, the issue of understaffing of nurses in hospitals is a point of concern since it results in major negative outcomes. From my own experience, I think that the nursing profession has been under looked such that there is a shortage of nurses in hospitals, which causes situational workload. Nurses are made they to work on longer shifts, with more workloads, which negatively affects their delivery of patient care. High patient to nurse ratios causes poor health care delivery, errors and sometimes death caused by inadequate nursing care. Recognizing the complexity of care for patients, understaffing of nurses is a major problem that should be looked into and proper interventions should be created to reduce or stop the issue.
References
Glette, M. K., Aase, K., & Wiig, S. (2017). The relationship between understaffing of nurses and patient safety in hospitals-A literature review with thematic analysis.
Snavely, T. M. (2016). A brief economic analysis of the looming nursing shortage in the United States. Nursing Economics , 34 (2), 98-101.
Twigg, D. E., Gelder, L., & Myers, H. (2015). The impact of understaffed shifts on nurse ‐ sensitive outcomes. Journal of advanced nursing , 71 (7), 1564-1572.
Zboril-Benson, L. R. (2016). Why nurses are calling in sick: the impact of health-care restructuring. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive , 33 (4).
