Staffing and scheduling are considered highly intricate functions for nurse managers. It is not only time-consuming but also necessitates that healthcare providers have sufficient nurses to deliver the required care. Major concerns associated with staffing and scheduling in nursing practice include workload, resources, condition severity, and intensity.
The volume of work a nurse has affects their performance. This is in the sense that fewer nurses imply more workload according to MacPhee, Dahinten, and Havaei (2017). The consequence heavy workload has in nursing is the delivery of care that is below standards of nursing practice. Therefore, when staffing and scheduling, managers should consider the number of nurses available the amount of work to be done.
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Staff planning, which partly involves determining vital resources, helps run nursing practice efficiently. A hospital’s capacity to offer its nurses with their needs determines the extent to which they can plan their staffing and scheduling. The insufficiency or unavailability of resources to cover needs such as compensation and benefits, limits nurse manager’s ability to schedule nurses.
In a clinical setting, the severity of illnesses and conditions vary. Consequently, the number of nurses required to provide care in such situations also differ ( Maenhout & Vanhoucke, 2013) . For instance, when there is an outbreak of a serious illness like Ebola, for example, more nurses would be expected to show up at their respective work stations. As such, nurse managers would be required to provide more nurses for needed care.
Staffing and scheduling patterns differ across hospitals largely because of nursing intensity. Patient-to-nurse staffing ratios in the intensive care unit and adult medical units, for example, vary. While that of ICU may be 2:1 or 1:1, that of a medical group may be 8:1 ( Welton, Unruh, & Halloran, 2006) . This shows that the degree of intensity in various units determines the amount of nursing staff required to address the multiple needs of the patients.
Nursing is critical to the effective delivery of care in the healthcare sector. Because of its role, and the demanding nature of healthcare, a majority of states dictate that hospitals must maintain a minimum staffing level or work within a predefined threshold of staffing capacity. When identifying staffing and scheduling patterns of nurses in healthcare, the factors discussed above must be factored into the equation.
References
MacPhee, M., Dahinten, V. S., & Havaei, F. (2017). The impact of heavy perceived nurse workloads on patient and nurse outcomes. Administrative Sciences , 7 (1), 7.
Maenhout, B., & Vanhoucke, M. (2013). An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems. Omega , 41 (2), 485-499.
Welton, J. M., Unruh, L., & Halloran, E. J. (2006). Nurse staffing, nursing intensity, staff mix, and direct nursing care costs across Massachusetts hospitals. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration , 36 (9), 416-425.
