Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues A Description of a National Healthcare Issue/Stressor (Nurse Shortage) and How it May Impact My Work Setting

Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues A Description of a National Healthcare Issue/Stressor (Nurse Shortage) and How it May Impact My Work Setting

Healthcare facilities are tasked with the responsibility of providing high-quality care to patients thus improving their hospital experience, patient satisfaction, and patient outcomes (Gray et al., 2018). However, the provision of high-quality services in healthcare facilities has been hindered by several issues /stressors thus leading to the high cost of healthcare services and unsatisfactory care. Haddad et al., (2020) explain one of the main issues that healthcare organizations have been struggling with as the shortage of nurses. The older population is growing rapidly and nurses are needed in higher numbers to provide care to this population since the elderly population has diverse health issues with some needing full-time palliative care. Additionally, the emergency of pandemics like the covid-19 has greatly stressed healthcare facilities because of the surge in patient population thus needing an increased number of nurses to help in providing healthcare services.

During this covid-19 season, there has been a patient population increase in our healthcare setting and therefore, new staffing models have been developed to ensure that all patients are attended to and high-quality care is provided to them. Findings from a study by Drennan & Ross (2019) delineates that due to the shortage of nurses, the available nurses are working to their best to ensure that all patients receive and this has led to increased nurse burnout. Therefore, it is important to understand that shortage of nurses is an issue that affects the patients, the available nurses, and the healthcare facility because nurse turnover is witnessed in facilities with nurses’ shortages due to nurse burnout. For high-quality and safe nursing care services to be delivered, the management in our healthcare facilities developed measures to ensure that all nurses are vaccinated against covid-19.  Receiving the vaccine is a personal decision that an individual has to make and therefore, the facility experienced nurse turnover due to the vaccination directive thus leading to increased nurse shortage. This has greatly impacted the delivery of high-quality healthcare services because nurse to patient ratio does not balance.