Healthcare Streamlining

Healthcare Streamlining: The Need for Increasing Nurse Staffing as a Means of Improving Patient Outcomes
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Healthcare Streamlining: The Need for Increasing Nurse Staffing as a Means of Improving Patient Outcomes
Introduction
Access to affordable healthcare is what is usually considered when assessing the reliability and value of a healthcare system. Not surprisingly, most social, economic, and political policies tend to focus on making healthcare accessible to as many people as possible, especially among the middle and lower class families. In the U.S., for instance, the Obama administration, through the National Health Care Act, intends to expand healthcare access to majority of Americans through affordable insurance policies. In the quest to achieve affordable health care, however, it is easy to forget, as is often the case, a very important aspect of healthcare delivery; quality of care. Most people are not concerned about the quality of healthcare services they receive, as long as they are able to access it when they need. This is understandable given the harsh economic times that many families today are contending with, more so after the recent economic meltdown whose effects are still visible across many industry sectors. Regardless, receiving quality healthcare is as important as being able to access it. This is because healthcare delivery is a result-oriented service, in which patient outcome is the point of focus. Access to healthcare is meaningful only when the patient receives adequate and effective treatment to improve their health. In this regard, promoting quality care is a factor that policy makers and health institutions should consider when implementing policies related to patient care.
Nevertheless, the role of nurse staffing in promoting quality care is commonly overlooked due to its implications on cost (Lorh, Yordy, & Thier, 1988). While it’s undeniable that increasing the ratio of physicians to patients will improve service delivery, this approach is usually put aside because it means spending more. Healthcare providers, managers and policy makers attempt to compensate for this problem through cheaper alternatives, such as managing the available nursing staff effectively. Through a review of the literature, this paper examines the importance of sufficient nursing staff in improving the quality of care and patient outcome. It argues that increasing the level of staffing of nurses informed at policy level for patients that have inadequate and unsafe nurse staffing levels decreases negative health outcomes, compared to better management of existing staff.
Discussion
The fact that there is a shortage of nurses in America’s healthcare sector is an issue of serious concern that needs to be addressed urgently. A sufficient nurse workforce is necessary to over Americans better healthcare services. Following the legislation of various laws aimed at making healthcare affordable to the majority of citizens, the problem of nurse shortage is likely to be even more serious than it is at the moment. Another issue that may be unrelated to the focus of this paper but of very critical significance is the trend of lifestyles in the American society, and which points to a future population that will be in need of more healthcare services, is the health risks associated with obesity and weight gain. As people’s living standards improve, a majority of Americans are able to afford to be luxurious and impulsive in their spending, which includes drinking and eating a lot. Being able to afford personal means of transport also means that most people do not engage in physical exercises such as walking. This means that more people are exposed to health risks such as obesity and heart disease. Accordingly, it is prudent for the government, healthcare providers and relevant policy makers to anticipate the potential crisis that an increase in the number of people seeking healthcare services will create, and implement safeguards to avoid such a crisis from occurring.
Appraisal of Research Articles
The selected research articles present research findings that showing that poor nurse staffing is directly related to poor patient outcomes. This in turn supports the need for increasing staffing levels in the health sector as a means of improving patient safety and quality of care services. In the article “Literature Review: Safe Nurse Staffing,” the author discusses the negative effects of understaffing the healthcare sector. Nurse staffing has a direct effect on patient satisfaction, patient mortality, medical errors, and nurse satisfaction and burnout. Through a review of the literature, the author found out that deficiencies in nurse staffing leads to adverse effects on patients, such as increased mortality levels, low satisfaction, and wrong diagnosis due to physician errors. Physician errors are attributed to nurse burnout due to working for long hours (Camphor, 2012). Overworking also has the negative effect of discouraging nurses and killing their morale. These findings support the need to create a working environment that will motivate nurses by making their job easier and flexible. One way of achieving this is by creating a sufficient workforce to handle increasing patient needs. Stanton (2004) in “Hospital Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care” presents a similar view by noting that patient needs have increased over the years while the number of nurses continues to decrease. This trend shows that nurse shortage is a real and serious problem that needs to be addressed urgently before it translates into a national health crisis.
Another point that the author identifies is the influence of organizational and economic concerns on nurse staffing. Healthcare providers usually operate within a predetermined budget, and the level of services they offer is determined by the available resources. Understaffing of nurses, therefore, may be a result of working within a deficient budget. The financial constraints that healthcare providers face often compels them to implement cost-cutting measures, such as decreasing the number of workers (nurses) and doing away with some patient-centered services that are not directly related to medical care, but critical to patient outcome, such as counseling patients and their families.
A striking fact identified by Camphor (2008) is that a large section of the American population is getting old. This could only mean one thing; the number of old persons requiri...