Nursing/health care issues paper

Nursing/health care issues paper

Introduction

Lewis Thomas wrote, in The Youngest Science that hospitals are “held together, glued together, enabled to function…by the nurses” (Thomas, 1995, p. 67). Nurses hold a significant position in working of any hospital or institution. In the United States, there are about 1.3 million registered nurses. However, an increasing number of them are dissatisfied with their working conditions. This is partly due to the hospitals responding to financial pressures from Medicare and private payers. According to the nurses, the quality of inpatient care is continuously declining; even though, the amount of hours of care per patient presented by the nurses has increased since the mid-1990s. This data have raised particular question whether the staffing of nurses has been able to keep up with the rising demand, in order to ensure safe and high-quality care (Needleman, Buerhaus, Mattke, Stewart, & Zelevinsky, 2002, pp. 1715-1722).

Various researches have been done to view the level of nurse staffing in hospitals and its association with the patients' outcome; however, they have been inconclusive. At the same time, some studies do demonstrate an association between a higher level of staffing by nurses and reduced mortality rates (Needleman et al 2002, pp. 1715-1722). A report of the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) Committee regarding the Adequacy of Nurse Staffing in Hospitals and other institutions states that nursing is a significant factor, which determines the quality of care provided in hospitals, as well as, the nature of patient outcomes. For this reason, nurse staffing is a critical health policy issue which holds a significant consensus on an abstract level, with reduced agreement on what the research data proves, and an active disagreement regarding the appropriate directions to the policy to ensure optimal public safety. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and discuss the current scenario of impact, the nurse staffing in hospitals and other health institutions, have on quality of patient care, as well as, safety focused outcomes (Clarke & Donaldson, 2008).

Discussion

Background

Since several decades, researches of health services have been working on linking nurse staffing with the hospital care outcomes. However, nurse staffing was not the primary focus of these studies. The National Center for Nursing Research called an invitational conference regarding patient outcomes research with respect to the effectiveness of nursing practice. It was hoped that with the advancement of methods used to quantitatively measure the patient care, it better links it with the structure of nurse staffing. However, the IOM report of 1996 showed no association between the important of nurse staffing and its effects on acute hospital care, at the present time (Clarke & Donaldson, 2008, pp. 1-25).

Since the 1996 report, there has been a tremendous amount of growth in this body of literature. During the last decade, hospital reconstruction and market competition resulted in aggressive cost cutting. Nurse staffing has a great impact leading to heavier workloads. This further raised concerns for adequacy of the nurse staffing. Recently, the shortage of nurses was observed, which ...