RESEARCH PAPER

Not having enough qualified staff members within a long term health care facility

Not having enough qualified staff members within a long term health care facility

Introduction

Within the last ten years, a great deal of effort, time and money has been consumed to enhance care within long term health facilities, with below satisfactory outcomes. External oversight mechanisms, measurement tools and quality standards all are significant to provide quality care, although these factors fail to guarantee a competence for responding to oversight as intended, using the measures correctly, or implementing the standards effectively. As the system of long-term care persists to change and develop, novel challenges crop up, offering more than enough prospects for new studies for being carried out and for subsisting studies for being applied in novel methods. Unstable financing, a lack of care integration, queries concerning how to deliver and measure quality care, and workforce shortages are amongst the fundamental challenges facing the long-term care field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of insufficient qualified staff members with a Long Term Health Care Facility and the quality of resident care.

Discussion and Analysis

The system of long-term care is an enormous, multifaceted configuration of services, which grew over a comparatively short period of time. The research of health services, in a number of ways has contributed to the field as it developed. The alternatives growth to institutional care, comprising of community- and home- based care, to some extent branched from the projects of demonstration like the National Long Term Care Demonstration, which the federal government sponsored. Measures of ADL (Activities of Daily Living) that surfaced from various researches assisted for reframing the thinking regarding the treatment of long term care recipients (Raphael, 2003).

In recent years, numerous plans have been put in place for facilitating the capability of nursing homes for producing enhanced results for people utilizing long term care. Within the long-term care facilities the research on care quality and staffing corroborates that to ensure quality adequate staffing levels are quite significant, although not many researches have studied how both of them are linked to each other (Bowers, Esmond & Jacobson, 2000).

Sufficient numbers of well-supervised, well-trained staffs are vital to quality within long-term health care facilities. The Public Law 100-203 (the 1987 Act of Nursing Home Reform) promised all residents of long-term health care facilities that they had the rights of expecting services and care from the long-term health care facilities that will allow them for maintaining or attaining their highest practicable levels of psychosocial, physical and mental functioning. However, unfortunately the United States Congress did not took that additional step and require a detailed minimal resident-staff ratio or lowest standard setting out the number of hours per patient day, which all residents must be receiving care. The adequate staffing issue is gaining and becoming more and more interesting to the legislatures throughout the country (Harrington, 1996). Within the last couple of years, around two-thirds of all states within the United States have either ordered a committee for ...