BUSI 311 DB6 Reply: Lauren Robertson (Staff Shortages in Healthcare)
Reply to the below thread utilizing at least two scholarly sources and a biblical integration.
Staff Shortages in Healthcare
COLLAPSE
A recent issue that has made itself more prevalent recently that human resource manager’s face in healthcare is employee staffing. According to the article titled “Hospitals will likely continue to have staffing shortages despite falling COVID-19 cases,” before the pandemic numbers in physicians, nursing assistants, in home health aides, medical lab technicians and nurse practitioners were expected to decline by 2025 (Hackett, 2021). The pandemic has set nursing staff into overdrive as the number of nurses is being overwhelmed by the number of patients. Due to the nurse shortage wages as high as $150 an hour are being offered to travel nurses versus their usual $48 an hour wage. The pandemic has not only affected healthcare staff physically, but mentally as well. Nurses working first hand with COVID-19 patients had to quarantine from their families in order to keep them safe. The loneliness that can come from quarantine can trigger anxiety and/or depression. Some healthcare staff quit their jobs due to the risk of spreading the virus to loved ones, and the mental toll it took over them at the start of the pandemic and even still today, which put a lot of people in a financial strain as well.
According to the CDC maintaining the appropriate amount of staff members in a facility is essential to health care personal’s safety as well as patient safety (CDC, 2021). Despite the pandemic creating a shortage of healthcare workers, this has always been an issue, the pandemic just made it much worse. One suggestion to avoid losing healthcare workers is to provide personally tailored health care support for healthcare staff. According to an ABC news article 3 in 10 health care workers have considered leaving the profession, and 6 in 10 say the pandemic has burned them out (Romero & Bhatt, 2021).
References
CDC. (2021, March 10). Strategies to Mitigate Healthcare Personnel Staffing Shortages. Retrieved from Ceneters for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/mitigating-staff-shortages.html
Hackett, M. (2021, March 04). Hospitals will likely continue to have staffing shortages despite falling COVID-19 cases. Retrieved from Healthcare Finance: https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-will-likely-continue-have-staffing-shortages-despite-falling-covid-19-cases
Romero, L., & Bhatt, D. (2021, May 21). Pandemic has made shortage of health care workers even worse. Retrieved from ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/US/pandemic-made-shortage-health-care-workers-worse-experts/story?id=77811713
