Impact of Nursing Heavy Workload on Nurses and Patients



Impact of Nursing Heavy Workload on Nurses and Patients

Introduction

The profession of nursing in US is said to be the second largest of all the professions in the country. Nurses play an important and integral role in providing quality health care services to patients. The quality of services provided develops a strong rapport between nurses and patients. In the past few decades, the profession of nursing has become very demanding. This is due to the increasing pressure in the health sector due to an aging population and other health related issues. This has increased the pressure and workload on the nurses. The quality of health care services provided by nurses in hospital is greatly compromised due to the unbound pressure and workload on them.

The issue of workload and turnover of nurses has influenced the quality of services provided to patients in the hospital. The concern has to be resolved so to minimize the risks of health related issues a patient can confront in the hospital due to poor care and services provided by the nurses. Professional Judgment Method and Staffing program can reduce stress and workload of nurses. This will ensure that nurses provide optimum health care services to patients. This program would increase the likelihood of patients' well-being and job satisfaction of nurses. The program would mitigate the turnover and staffing issues of nurses to a considerable level.

Discussion

Staffing Of Nurses and Turnover and Its Impact

With increased workload in the hospital, the nurses are bound to provide quality care to many patients at one time. The nurses are assigned to multiple patients both at daytime and at night. This affects the care provided to the patient and increases stress upon nurses; hence they confront job dissatisfaction and quit from their profession. They refuse to work in a large community centers and hospitals due to unbound stress and pressure. This is why the turnover of nurses has increased over the past few years. The nurses prefer to work at home based care system which is less stressful compared to the hospital and clinical settings (Hunt, 2009). The nurses are paid more and have to focus on one patient at every specific shift. The recession and turnover of nurses has become a concerning issue in US today. This has laid an adverse impact on the profitability and performances of the hospitals. At average, the hospitals lose about $300,000 per year due to nurses' turnover (Hunt, 2009).

Inadequate nurse staffing has an adverse impact in the overall health of patients and services provided to them. According to a survey made, every patient added to a nurse workload over a certain limit increased the chances of mortality of patient by 7% within a month of his admission in the hospital (Patterson, 2011). Under such an environment, where the workload on nurses was huge, percentage of mortality of patients and rates of failure to rescue were higher (Aiken et.al. 2002). Nurses were more burnout under stressful environment ...