The drugs and substance abuse in nurses is a dangerous phenomenon that affects 10% to 15% of all the nurse population in the United States of America. The nurse population is a risk population to suffer substance abuse due to:
Stress in the work: The nurse population must affront situation of sick people, twenty-four hours a day and support the medical doctor's needs.
Access to medications and drugs: The nurse population has access every day to substances and drugs of any kind exposing them to the source of the problem.
No care of themselves: The nurses have the duty to take care of the patients, but they forgot to take care of themselves.
The use of a balanced scorecard, a tool created by Robert Kaplan y David Norton in 1992, allows the analyst to see the business from four perspectives and related them, those perspectives are: financial perspective, client perspective, internal perspective and innovation perspective. The use of the balanced scorecard to address the substance abuse in nurses. The financial perspective of the substance abuse includes the costs for the hospital of the substance abuse and the cost of treatment to the nurse to eliminate the dependence of the substance. The client perspective is the perspective of the patients of the hospital; there will benefits for the patients if the nurses are free of vicious and dependence of drug substances. The internal perspective refers to the quality of the work of the nurses and the relation between the co-workers, the administration of the hospital and the nurses. In the innovation perspective, there is the need to include the participation of all the nursing staff of the hospital to help other to get over the substance dependence. The goal is to convert a nurse with substance problems to an advocate that help others to eliminate the addiction.
The following graph is a proposal of a balanced scorecard for substance abuse in nursing.
Reference List
Kaplan, Robert S. & David P. Norton, the Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
Heacock, Sue, Nurses and Substance Abuse. Nurse Together, 2013, Retrieved from http://www.nursetogether.com/nurses-and-substance-abuse#sthash.rf9Pd4JR.dpuf
