Nurse Workload Analysis

Health care has face multiple issues over the years. One of the most important and urgent issue, is the amount of workload that health care workers are faced with each day. Health care workers most of the time care for more hospitalized patients than they can handle and they are in charge of additional amount of paperwork. Those factors not only can compromise the patient safety, but also it can affect the workers stress level and mental health. As a future Medical student, personally this issue it is really important and it needs to be solved urgently for the safety of patients and for the future of health care workers. The amount of workload can prevent doctors and nurses from, fully discussing treatment options with patients and miss vital signs of illness that could affect the chances of survival. Other factors is that health care
workers are at a high risk of experiencing severe distress, burnout, and both mental and physical illness caused by the amount of workload.
For this reason hospital administrators need to ensure that each healthcare facility is provided with a sufficient amount of staff, an organized schedule, and an electronic system to reduce the workload of healthcare workers and gives patients the best possible care.
The shortage of staff, especially of nurses and physicians has a negative impact on workload and patient safety. Not having enough health care workers can make doctors to not fully evaluate the patient and order unnecessary test, because they did not have enough time to examine the patient's’ case. In the article “U.S HealthCare Worker Shortage Escalating: Sterling Warns Medical Practitioners to Rapidly Reverse Low Employee Retention.” The author emphasize that the U.S healthcare workers shortage crisis is expected to intensify as baby boomers join the ranks of senior citizens and 27 million Obamacare insured Americans place a demand on an already overburdened healthcare system. Additionally, as older healthcare employees retire, there will be fewer qualified staff to replaced them. It is important to
emphasize that staff shortage it is not the only factor that affects negatively the workload and the patient safety. Another factor is the several amount of paperwork that healthcare workers have to deal with every day. In the article “ Doctors Wasting Over Two-Thirds of Their Time Doing Paperwork.” The author Bruce Y. Lee, talks about how in a decade paperwork has gone from being a large chunk to a majority of a doctor’s time. He explains a study from the American Medical Association, that followed 57 U.S physicians for total of 430 hours. The results were that “ Physicians spent 27% of their time in their offices seeing patients and 49.2% of their time doing paperwork, which includes using the electronic health record system.” This study indicates that paperwork is consuming a third of physician’s time, which can increase the workload and reduces the amount of time they can actually spend with patients. This factors add towards the responsibility of the healthcare workers, which can increase the chances of medical error. It is important for hospitals administrators to understand that solving the amount of workload it is not just for the benefit of improving the patient's safety, but also for the workers because it can affect them negatively.
One of the main issues with overworked is that it can affect the health care workers mental and physical health. They can face a wide range of psychosocial stressors and a high risk of