In a health organization, nurses play a critical role in the general healthcare to the patients. Hence their shortages would result in various implications in the provision of services. To start with, shortage of nurses results in long working hours for nurses under unpleasant working conditions which leads to injury, fatigue and dissatisfaction of jobs. As a resulting shortage of nurses leads to alarming increased mortality rates in hospitals. In the organization, the shortage of nurses will lead to more errors during delivery hence increased mortality rates. This is because there is a higher number of patients than that of nurses hence the nurses are more likely to experience burnout and dissatisfaction resulting in low rescue rates of pregnant mothers hence leading to more deaths (Weaver et al., 2018).
In the event where the organization experiences an acute shortage of nursing personnel for a very long time, the facility may become overwhelmed due to a high number of patient turn-out as compared to the available nurses. In such a case, the nurses will not only strain but also experience lapses which will reduce their effectiveness, especially when dealing with critical patients. This will result in deaths hence an overall higher mortality rate than when the number of nurses is sufficient (Weaver et al., 2018).
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Moreover, the shortage of nursing staff in the organization will also lead to medication errors. A medication error is a failure in the process of patient treatment which inflicts harm to the patient. Besides, dispensing the wrong drug, the wrong formulation of the drug and administering the wrong dose through a wrong route are other are among some of the prescription errors that occur as a result of an insufficient number of nurses personnel in the organization. Shortage of nurses in this scenario will result in heavy workloads for the nurses to bear causing them to develop psychological fatigue hence limiting their concentration which and eventually leading to prescription faults among other medication errors.
References
Weaver, M. S., Wichman, B., Bace, S., Schroeder, D., Vail, C., Wichman, C., & Macfadyen, A. (2018). Measuring the impact of the home health nursing shortage on family caregivers of children receiving palliative care. Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing, 20(3), 260.
