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Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues.

Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues

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. 

Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues.How my Health System Work Setting Has Responded to the Healthcare Issue/Stressor and What Changes May Have Been Implemented

Our health system work setting is responding to the issue by recruiting more nurses to replace those that quit and the management is making sure that the recruited nurses are all vaccinated. This helps in spreading the virus as well as proving safe healthcare services to patients. Additionally, new staffing models have been developed to allow flexible shifts and appropriate nurse-to-patient ratios, which has greatly improved the quality of healthcare services, patient experience, patient satisfaction, as well as patient outcomes (Marć et al., 2019). As advised by Broome & Marshall (2021), our healthcare system has allowed healthcare providers and nurses to be involved in developing solutions for issues that arise in the facility and this has played a significant role in developing strategies that improve patient care while reducing nurse burnout and turnover.

It is important to understand that nurse shortage leads to nurses doing extra work without rest thus resulting in nurse burnout and most instances, healthcare facilities witness nurse turnover due to burnouts (Drennan & Ross, 2019). Therefore, changes that are being implemented in our healthcare setting include new staffing models that allow flexible shifts and appropriate nurse-to-patient ratios and the employment of nurses that meet the qualifications or standards set by the organization. These changes will greatly help in reducing the nurse shortage issue as well as improving the quality of services provided to patients by providing coordinated and patient-centered care which is the ultimate goal of care facilities.

References

Broome, M., & Marshall, E. S. (2021). Transformational leadership in nursing: From expert clinician to influential leader (3rd ed.).

Drennan, V. M., & Ross, F. (2019). Global nurse shortages: The facts, the impact, and action for change. British medical bulletin, 130(1), 25-37. DOI: 10.1093/bmb/ldz014

Gray, K., Wilde, R., & Shutes, K. (2018). Enhancing nurse satisfaction: an exploration of specialty nurse shortage in a region of NHS England. Nursing Management, 25(1). DOI: 10.7748/nm.2018.e1695

Haddad, L. M., Annamaraju, P., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2020). Nursing shortage. StatPearls [Internet].

Marć, M., Bartosiewicz, A., Burzyńska, J., Chmiel, Z., & Januszewicz, P. (2019). A nursing shortage–a prospect of global and local policies. International nursing review, 66(1), 9-16.

Question Description

Discussion: Review of Current Healthcare Issues

If you asked ten people what they thought was the most important issue facing healthcare today, you might get ten different answers. Costs increasing? Regulation? What about technological disruption?

These, and many other topics, are debatable. Not surprisingly, much has been said about these topics in research, within the profession, and in the media. There is no shortage of changes to be made, whether they are related to finance, quality, workload, or outcomes.

In this Discussion, you will look at a national healthcare issue and consider how it may affect your workplace. You also examine how your organization has dealt with this problem.

To Get Ready:

Examine the Resources and choose one current national healthcare issue/stressor to concentrate on.

Consider the current national healthcare issue/stressor you chose, and consider how it might be addressed in your workplace.

Post a description of the national healthcare issue/stressor you chose for analysis, as well as an explanation of how the healthcare issue/stressor may affect your work environment. Then, describe how your health system’s work setting responded to the healthcare issue/stressor, including any changes that were implemented. Provide specifics and examples.

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You should proofread your paper. However, do not rely solely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part, and your grade will suffer as a result. Papers with a high number of misspelled words and grammatical errors will be penalized. Before submitting your paper, go over it in silence and then aloud, and make any necessary changes. It is often beneficial to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Uncorrected mistakes are preferable to handwritten corrections.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point typeface (10 to 12 characters per inch). Smaller or compressed type, as well as papers with narrow margins or single spacing, are difficult to read. It is preferable to allow your essay to exceed the recommended number of pages rather than attempting to compress it into fewer pages.

Large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are also unacceptable, waste trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced, and have a one-inch margin on all four sides of each page. When submitting hard copies, use white paper and print with dark ink. It will be difficult to follow your argument if it is difficult to read your essay.

RE: Discussion – Week 1

     Way to often healthcare workers are exposed to workplace violence. In healthcare, workplace violence is vastly underreported. Nurses feel they have an obligation to “do no harm,” and a culture has been created where reporting assaults on health care staff to law enforcement is frowned upon. In my personal experience I have witnessed administrators attempt to persuade employees from filing police reports after they had been assaulted. Working in a psychiatric facility staff encounter dangerous patients daily and can be subjected to not only verbal aggression but physical violence as well. The impact of these violent experiences can cause employees to have decreased job satisfaction, and a lack of commitment to their job, which can greatly impact patient outcomes (Claudius et al., 2017). An international review of violence against employees in psychiatric facilities found that 55% of nurses experienced physical assault and 73% encountered verbal aggression annually (Fenwick & Kelly, 2017). In 2013 Texas became the 34th state to increase the penalty for assaulting and ER nurse to a third-degree felony (2021). Although Texas has a long way to go, in holding patients accountable after assaulting health care workers, we are at least moving in the right direction.

The facility I work at is facing the same staffing shortage that is seen across the United States. With the shortage we have seen a rise on physical assaults on staff. In an attempt to combat these assaults our administrators have begrudgingly refused admission to patients who have a history of assaulting staff. Mandatory training is conducted yearly on crisis prevention institute techniques (CPI), and verbal de-escalation. Unfortunately, in a psychiatric facility many times these techniques are unsuccessful. I would like to create a culture at my facility that holds patients accountable for assaulting staff. In my experience the type of patient that assaults staff is not simply a patient in psychosis who is incapable of understanding right from wrong, it’s the patient who is angry about a particular situation not going their way. It is time that nurses no longer feel that being assaulted is part of their job.

Claudius, I. A., Desai, S., Davis, E., & Henderson, S. (2017, October). Case-controlled analysis of patient-based risk factors for assault in the healthcare workplace. The western journal of emergency medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654887/.

Fenwick, K. M., & Kelly, E. L. (2017, October 31). Sources of social support after patient assault as related to staff well-being – Erin L. Kelly, Karissa M. Fenwick, John S. Brekke, Raymond W. Novaco, 2021. SAGE Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0886260517738779.

Workplace Violence Against Nurses: Lawmakers & Hospitals take action to curb violence against nurses. NursingLicensure.org – A more efficient way to find nursing license requirements in your state. (2021, September 21). https://www.nursinglicensure.org/articles/workplace-violence/.

Great post! I agree that healthcare affordability is one of the main issues impacting healthcare standards among individuals. I agree that individuals’ have challenges when seeking care with inadequate finances since insurance coverage overlooks various healthcare issues, exposing patients to substantial costs. In most settings, healthcare spending has been growing, which presents opportunities to enhance treatment costs as facilities struggle to maintain their operational budgets, such as salaries, making it challenging for patients to acquire affordable quality care (Shrank et al., 2021). The issue extends to people with insurance, highlighting it as a critical problem that requires the administration’s management to prevent deteriorating healthcare conditions among the public. The issue impacts nursing operations since it introduces limited chances of administering practice, making it challenging to assert a positive influence on the community. In other cases, acquiring salaries is challenging, which lowers operational morale when handling different cases, presenting opportunities for low-quality care administration.

In addition, you explain that the issue raises the need for advocacy protocols to establish better operational policies where practitioners can administer care at affordable prices and prevent healthcare complications associated with specific cases. Nonetheless, there have been efforts to introduce technological modules and devise ways to lower healthcare costs by implementing cost-effective protocols (Zeadally et a., 2020). The passing of the ACA as a national reform regulation has also contributed to deriving ways to lower healthcare costs and enhance insurance coverage among individuals. Some ways of tackling the affordability issues include providing free preventive care and ensuring insurance institutions do not exploit individuals by including substantial fees in their covers. Moreover, Medicare and Medicaid programs are increasing accessibility, especially among impoverished people, combating affordability barriers. Therefore, although healthcare affordability is one of the main issues facing healthcare, various strategies have been aimed at combating it, presenting high chances of care accessibility.

References

Shrank, W. H., DeParle, N., Gottlieb, S., Jain, S. H., Orszag, P., Powers, B. W., & Wilensky, G. R. (2021). Health costs and financing: Challenges and strategies for a new administration. Health Affairs40(2), 235-242. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01560

Links to an external site.

Zeadally, S., Siddiqui, F., Baig, Z., & Ibrahim, A. (2020). Smart healthcare: Challenges and potential solutions using the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics. PSU research review4(2), 149-168. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/PRR-08-2019-0027/full/html