A major challenge in nursing revolves around staffing. Inappropriate staffing of nurses in health institutions has contributed to both professional and institutional challenges. Currently, practicing nurses have to cover mandatory overtime due to the personnel shortage. Nursing shortage has contributed to the lack of nursing staff. The nursing problem affects the practicing nurses as well as health care institutions (American Nurses Association, 2013). The staffing problem has risen due to hospital administrators channeling their funds towards medical technology investments as compared to personnel investment. Some states like California have identified staffing as a problem in nursing and have formulated a policy, which regulates the staffing ratios in a bid to increase the number of professionals and the quality of health care services (American Nurses Association, 2013).
Inadequate staffing is a problem in nursing because it affects both patient health and safety in the health care institutions. Professionally, inadequate staffing means that the staff employed by a hospital or other care institutions have to work for more hours (Kreml, 2014). Today, most nurses have to work additional shifts to cater for the scarcity of nurses.
Overworking contributes to low morale among the nurses. Compulsory additional shifts lead to fatigue among the working nurses. These nurses also suffer from an increased injury rate due to the long working hours. The American Nurses Association continues to emphasize on the urgency and need to hire more nurses within the health care industry (American Nurses Association, 2013).
The shortage of qualified nursing professional’s leads lowers the quality of health and nursing care services offered in these institutions. With the low number of available qualified nursing professionals, health organizations do not achieve their functions in offering quality health care (Kreml, 2014). Understaffing contributes to overworking which demoralizes the nursing care professionals. In addition, the understaffing affects institutions that offer health care because they receive few qualified workers who have to attend to a high number of patients.
Staffing is a nursing problem because when health care institutions have inadequate personnel then the available staffs have to perform additional tasks. In addition, offering low quality health care and overworking the available qualified staff presents nursing as an unattractive profession (Nieswiadomy, 2012).
The Relevance of Staffing as a Relevant Nursing Problem
Providing quality health care services is a key objective of nursing professionals as well as health care institutions. Staffing facilitates the provision of quality health care services because with adequate professionals, nurses do not have the burden of mandatory overtime schedules (Stanton, 2004). It means that with enough nursing professionals patients receive quality care because the ratio between nurses and patients balances.
When the ratio of nurses to patients is balanced, the practicing nurses do not complain of fatigue and stand a better chance to attend to patients professionally. Fatigued workers have a high absenteeism rate and appear to be lowly motivated towards performing their tasks (Stanton, 2004). Therefore, staffing affects the quality of health care services offered as well as the motivation level among the professionals.
Staffing saves lives as compared to investing in medical technology because the technology needs individuals who can administer it to the patients. Therefore, investing in nursing professionals is equally important as spending on medical technology in terms of improving the healthcare sector.
References
Nieswiadomy. R. M. (2012). Foundations of Nursing Research. New York: Pearson Education, Inc.
Stanton, M. W. (2004, March 3). Healthcare 411. Hospital Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care. Retrieved June 13, 2014, from http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/services/nursestaffing/index.html
American Nurses Association. (2013, April 2). Top Issues for Staff Nurses. Top Issues for Staff Nurses. Retrieved June 14, 2014, from http://www.nursingworld.org/EspeciallyForYou/Staff-Nurses/staffnurses
Kreml, B. B. (2014, June 6). Health Affairs. Nursing Problem. Retrieved June 14, 2014, from http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/22/2/282.1.full
