Nursing

Nurse workload linked to low staffing and patient safety?

ANSWER

Nurse Workload and Patient Care

Nurse workload and patient care

Nursing, one of the most lucrative careers globally, appeals to young people passionate about helping patients recover from their ailments. Despite its lucrative nature, it suffers from understaffing, which increases the workloads of the existing nurses. The reasons for understaffing include a shortage of qualified nurses, increased demand for trained nurses, retrenching of nurses to cut hospital’s budgets, and reduction of in-patient length of stay. Demand for nurses arises due to the increasing aging population. The decreasing mortality rate and long-life expectancy contribute to the increasing aging population. Due to compromised immunity, those people demand constant care, increasing the workload on the existing nurses. Between 2000 to 2020, the United States witnessed an 18% increase in the population of people aged above 65 (Browne & Braden, 2020). It predicts a further increase of the aged population by 54%. It means the existing nurses will struggle to keep up with the healthcare demand of the aging population. As a result, nurses will have to increase their workloads to meet the growing demand for their services.

An inadequate supply of qualified nurses due to poor enrolment increased educational demands, and dropping out of nursing colleges, coupled with an increasing demand for nurses, contributes to increasing nurse workloads. When nursing schools cannot produce nurses required to fill the available nursing positions, the workload will transfer to the existing nurses. Also, the increasing healthcare cost forces hospitals to relieve some nurses of their duties as a cost-cutting measure. Hospitals pay nurses high salaries. Hence, reducing their number will save the hospital some money. It can channel that money towards the reduction of healthcare costs. However, when hospitals release nurses, the workload will transfer to the remaining nurses.

Consequences of increased nurse workload on patient safety

Research shows that understaffing and increased workload on nurses’ harm patient welfare and safety. Work overload leads to fatigue and can lower a nurse’s morale. Hence, a tired nurse might perform critical errors that complicate a patient’s health. A leading cause of those errors is the nurse staffing ratio (Magalhães, et. al., 2019). The nurse staffing ratio compares the number of nurses against patients. It is also known as the nurse-to-patient ratio. A nurse is likely to strain if they see many patients per day. If a nurse takes double shifts in understaffed hospitals, the situation could be worse. It will wear down the nurse and interfere with their ability to administer medicine correctly. Therefore, it can increase patient deaths due to the wrong diagnosis.

Also, understaffing and increased nurse workload will increase nurses’ stress levels. The complexity of nursing as a career can stress a nurse. It can increase medical errors among those nurses. As the Human factor’s engineering principle claims, complex nursing tasks such as administering medicine, and creating a conducive environment to aid a patient’s recovery, can increase stress among nurses (Strum et. al., 2019). Those nurses, exposed to stressors, would commit errors that would negatively impact a patient’s health. Nurses predisposed to errors are likely to commit the following errors, which will interfere with the quality of healthcare provision.

Hence, understaffing of nurses hurts health care service provision. To deal with the situation, healthcare stakeholders should reduce the entry requirements for nurses to increase enrolments. Also, it should protect nurses from reduction to reduce the hospital’s budget. Finally, the healthcare sector should rely on shifts to give nurses more time to rest. Implementing such practices will protect nurses from experiencing fatigue and prevent them from seeing too many patients per shift. It will reduce the rate of errors and improve patient care.

References

Browne, J., & Braden, C. J. (2020). Nursing turbulence in critical care: Relationships with            nursing workload and patient safety. American Journal of Critical Care, 29(3), 182-           191.

Magalhães, A. M. M. D., Kreling, A., Chaves, E. H. B., Pasin, S. S., & Castilho, B. M.      (2019). Medication administration–nursing workload and patient safety in clinical         wards. Revista brasileira de enfermagem, 72, 183-189.

Sturm, H., Rieger, M. A., Martus, P., Ueding, E., Wagner, A., Holderried, M., … & WorkSafeMed Consortium. (2019). Do perceived working conditions and patient           safety culture correlate with objective workload and patient outcomes: A cross-           sectional explorative study from a German university hospital. PLoS One, 14(1),      e0209487.