Nursing Leadership and Management
Nurse Shortage Approaches
When nurses are forced to work with high nurse to patient ratios, patients can develop a variety of infections, get injured, and can lead to death. Often at times patients are discharged home too soon without adequate education about how to manage their illness or injury (Raquel & Sean, 2011). Because of patients being discharged to soon, this causes them to return back to the hospital often sicker than they were before. Increase in rate of admissions, transfers, and discharges on hospital unit’s raises nurses’ workload. When nurses have fewer patients, they are able to provide high quality care (Raquel & Sean, 2011). A quantitative research was done based on knowledge of unit’s attribute and shift by shift nurse staffing levels. The researchers inspected 43 units of medical and surgical patient’s mortality in an infamous magnet hospital here in United States. The units and shifts staffing data from 2003 to 2006 were obtained and consolidated with patient data resulting in 3.2 million unit shifts for 197961 patients. The outcome of two staffing variables were scrutinize using a shift unit level: understaffing actual registered nurses staffing eight hours or more below target staffing levels generated by a patient classification system and high turnover which means unit admissions, transfers and discharges exceeds mean day shift by one standard deviation. Patient survival rate was analyzed using Cox proportional hazard regression models with adjustment for clients, unit and shifts risk covariates was practiced. The risk adjust mortality was evaluated to staffing and turnover within the first 5 to 30 days after admission and during previous shifts. The result was dangerous ratios (Raquel & Sean, 2011).
The result shows that each shift and unit that where understaffed by 4 to 7% and also has high turnover the risk of patient’s death increases by 2 to 5%. The authors also
References: American Nurses Association (ANA 2014). Nursing leadership, management and leadership style. Retrieved on April 22, 2015 from. http://www.aanac.org/docs/white-papers/2013-nursing-leadership---management-leadership-styles.pdf?sfvrsn=4 American Nurses Association (ANA 2015). Nurse reinvestment act background. Retrieved on April 22, 2015 from. http://www.nursingworld.org/NurseReinvestmentAct.aspx Raquel, M., & Sean, C. (2011). Staffing with nurse understaffing and high patient churn linked to heightened inpatient mortality risk in a single site study. Evidence based nursing, Vol. 14, p122-123. Retrieved on April 22, 2015 from. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ebn.2011.100052 Sigma Theta Tau International (1199-2015). Honor Society of Nursing. Facts on the nursing shortage in North America. Retrieved on April 22, 2015, from. http://www.nursingsociety.org/Pages/default.aspx