High patient to nurse rate show
Introduction
Even though hospitals and healthcare centers with low nurse levels of staff as compared to the number of patients tend to have increased rates of poor patient results, increasing the levels of nurse staff is difficult. Among the key factors that lead to lower rates of nurse staff include the present higher acuity patients’ needs for more care, as well as, a countrywide gap in the number of positions that are available and the number nurses that are registered nurses willing and qualified to fill the positions (Rosseter, 2014). This being the case, therefore, the paper focuses on discussing the problem of high patient to nurse rate. The paper gives a background on the problem and the advantages and disadvantages of the issue.
Background
The high patient to nurse rate cause heavy workload for nurses in hospitals and care centers. This is caused by four major reason that include reduced staffing and increased overtime, insufficient supply of nurses, increased demand for nurses, and the reduction in patient length to stay (Dhillon, 2011). The low rate of nurses reflects substantial changes in career expectations, population demographics, worker satisfaction, and work attitudes. Although, the number of nursing vacancies is expected to increase tremendously as years go by, the number of nurses is also expected to increase, but by a smaller proportion. High patient rate to nurse is a great challenge that needs to be addressed as it leads to undesirable effects (Lake, Shang, Klaus, & Dunton, 2010).
Advantages and Disadvantages of high patient to nurse rate show
Advantages related to high patient to nurse rate are few since the costs outweigh the benefits. It results to job involvement as the nurse is always busy attending to many patients. This, in turn, leads to high job experience and career advancement. One of the disadvantages of high patient ratio to the number of nurses is that is associated with unpleasant outcomes such as deaths in hospitals (Rosseter, 2014)). This is because the nurse may not attend to all patients, leading to deaths and critical conditions of patients. High patient ratio to nurse also results to workload of the nurse, which may make the patient not to perform work efficiently and effectively. Workload leads to job dissatisfaction. There is also the disadvantage of increased costs.
References
Dhillon, B. (2011). Patient Safety: An Engineering Approach. Hoboken: CRC Press.
Rosseter, R. (2014). Nursing Shortage. American Association of Colleges of Nursin, 1(1), 1-7.
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