Many national healthcare stressors or issues affect and impact healthcare organizations
throughout the United States. All of them require addressing, although some are more urgent
than others. The healthcare issue chosen in this case, and one of the most significant stressors at
the moment, is the issue of upskilling healthcare professionals. In this context, these would be
the nurses working within the healthcare organization. According to Ross (2019), upskilling is
retraining employees to acquire new skills and continue practicing in their field efficiently.
Recent developments (particularly technological) within and around healthcare have necessitated
that workers such as nurses possess upgraded skill sets. Upskilling was identified as one of the
six crucial healthcare issues in 2019 by the PwC Health Research Institute (Ross, 2019). The
entire healthcare workforce is threatened with redundancy by artificial intelligence (AI)
technologies if they do not upskill. This includes nurses who have traditionally not been involved
with technology while delivering nursing care (Teague, 2019).
The impact of upskilling on my healthcare organization as a healthcare issue is immense. This is
because emerging healthcare technologies are becoming increasingly mandatory in diagnostics,
therapeutics, and nursing care. Nurses are, therefore, finding themselves short of skills to deliver
quality patient care. This makes the organization set aside resources to retrain and upgrade the
skills of its nurses so that they can cope with the emerging technological changes.
This, however, is an inevitably resource-intensive undertaking for the organization. In my
organization, for instance, the policymakers have already had to set aside funds to train the
nurses and other healthcare staff on using the recently introduced EHR. Already, upskilling is
happening in the healthcare sector with the now standard requirement for electronic health
records or EHR. That said, the hallmark of upskilling in healthcare is predicted to be artificial
intelligence-assisted telehealth interventions (Teague, 2019).
Some of the Areas of Concern
Healthcare organizations must invest in their workforce's abilities to have a competitive
advantage over their peers. Not doing so will render the organization unable to compete
effectively in an ever-changing healthcare marketplace. For instance, AI is increasingly used in
healthcare. This means the rising sophistication of emerging medical technologies drives the
need for upskilled health workers (Ross, 2019).
The advent of digital therapeutics is another area of concern. This is the treatment of disease
using healthcare technologies to complement or replace traditional methods in disease
management. The reality is that the clinical validation of these digital therapeutics products and
connected medical devices is already done by the Food and Drug Administration or FDA
(Siwicki, 2019). This is an indicator of the urgency with which upskilling of healthcare staff like
nurses should be treated
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