Effects of Nursing Staff Shortages to the Health Care System

Jessenia Castro

West Coast University

Capstone 401

Professors Thomas

August 25, 2022

Topic: Effects of Nursing Staff Shortages to the Health Care System

Nurses are very important people in the health care system. They are renowned for being proponents of healthcare promotion, training patients and the society about how to avoid diseases and injuries, taking part in rehabilitation, and offering assistance and care. Modern nursing responsibilities are complex, and they can only be understood via experience, observation, and the opinions of others. Nurses frequently put their own luxuries before the requirements of the people they look after on a daily basis. The nursing field has been known to be more female than male dominated over the years. However, there has been a rise of nurse shortages in the world especially with the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Purpose of pursuing the chosen Topic

This paper discusses the relevance of finding solutions to nurse shortages. It also illustrates the problems caused by nursing shortages, causes of nurse shortages and the possible solutions to this problem. The purpose of pursuing this topic is to reduce the negative effects of nursing shortages in the health care system. This goal is realistic when the government works together with the health facilities to achieve it.

Problems caused by Nurse Shortages

Nurse shortages cause a huge negative impact on the health care systems today. One of these impacts include, increase in patient deaths. This is because patients will be sent home to be taken care of by care givers rather than nursing professionals. Another impact is the increase of medication errors (Haddad et al., 2022). Studies have shown that 46.8% of nurses have committed errors in the last one year. These errors include giving medication to wrong patient, omission of medication, mistaken medication and giving a patient medication twice instead of once. Lastly, nursing shortages increase overcrowding in emergency rooms. This is because the nurse to patient ratio is uneven. By solving the nurse shortage problems, these negative impacts will be reduced.

Nursing shortages are caused by a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that the nurses are growing old and need to retire (Mac et al., 2019). They however lack people to replace them and some of them are forced to continue working even during old age. This mostly brings about inefficient work. Another cause of nurse shortage is nurse burnout. This is mainly caused by the availability of few nurses who are forced to work overtime (Manyisa & Aswegen, 2017). Since most of the nurses are females, they are forced to leave the profession to go and bear children and take care of their families. In some American states, the number of nurses is high compared to others. This results to shortages in states that have few nurses. This is also due to the fact that nurses will prefer to work in regions that are good for settling with their families (Haddad et al., 2022). Some nurses complain of emotional and physical abuse caused by the stressful hospital environment.

Possible Solutions to Nurse Shortages

The best known solution is increase in nurse salaries and incentives. This will make more people consider the nursing field. It will also make them feel motivated especially for the nurses who work in the unfriendly areas (Haddad et al., 2022). The male gender is also highly encouraged to join the nursing field so as to enable women to have maternity leaves and go take care of their families when need be. Male patients feel more understood when they are taken care of by male nurses. Health care institutions should also provide training and counseling to their staff. These will enable nurses to speak about the issues they face at work, prompting the management to find the solutions to the issues hence decrease in nurse turnover (Manyisa & Aswegen, 2017). In the event of pandemics or flu, the management of health institutions should hire temporary nurses to help the permanent ones. This will reduce chances of nurses getting burnout. Another solution is having policies that make health centers carry out effective nurse staffing which will increase job satisfaction and nurse retention rates therefore reducing nurse turnover (Holmberg et al., 2018). Nursing programs can also help reduce nurse shortages by increasing wages for nursing educators and therefore motivating them. The nurse students can also receive scholarships which will encourage them to start and finish the nursing courses without financial problems (Marc et al., 2019). Having nursing online classes will motivate more people to take up the nursing career since they do not have to travel to access institutions of higher learning.

References

Haddad, L. M., Annamaraju, P., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2022). Nursing shortage. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing. HYPERLINK “https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/

Holmberg, C., Caro, J., & Sobis, I. (2018). Job satisfaction among Swedish mental health nursing personnel: Revisiting the two‐factor theory. International journal of mental health nursing, 27(2), 581-592. HYPERLINK “https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher-Holmberg/publication/315839805_Job_satisfaction_among_Swedish_mental_health_nursing_personnel_Revisiting_the_two-factor_theory/links/59e245eb458515393d57efca/Job-satisfaction-among-Swedish-mental-health-nursing-personnel-Revisiting-the-two-factor-theory.pdf” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher-Holmberg/publication/315839805_Job_satisfaction_among_Swedish_mental_health_nursing_personnel_Revisiting_the_two-factor_theory/links/59e245eb458515393d57efca/Job-satisfaction-among-Swedish-mental-health-nursing-personnel-Revisiting-the-two-factor-theory.pdf

Manyisa, Z. M., & van Aswegen, E. J. (2017). Factors affecting working conditions in public hospitals: A literature review. International journal of Africa nursing sciences, 6, 28-38. HYPERLINK “https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2214139117300082?token=D0CC165AE5A35F826306E23E28CB281D82200AAFCC97C33F86A9FDD45EBDC8DBD687E104BD2018A858094210B8B55CDA&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20220824134123” https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2214139117300082?token=D0CC165AE5A35F826306E23E28CB281D82200AAFCC97C33F86A9FDD45EBDC8DBD687E104BD2018A858094210B8B55CDA&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20220824134123

Marć, M., Bartosiewicz, A., Burzyńska, J., Chmiel, Z., & Januszewicz, P. (2019). A nursing shortage–a prospect of global and local policies. International nursing review, 66(1), 9-16. HYPERLINK “https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joanna-Burzynska-2/publication/326584152_A_nursing_shortage_-_a_prospect_of_global_and_local_policies/links/5b7440dca6fdcc87df7fc0ac/A-nursing-shortage-a-prospect-of-global-and-local-policies.pdf” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joanna-Burzynska-2/publication/326584152_A_nursing_shortage_-_a_prospect_of_global_and_local_policies/links/5b7440dca6fdcc87df7fc0ac/A-nursing-shortage-a-prospect-of-global-and-local-policies.pdf