Staffing Decisions based on Sound Financial Management Principles and Compliance Guidelines

Staffing Matrix and Reflection Paper
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Staffing Matrix and Reflection Paper
Introduction
The United States (US) significantly spends more on healthcare compared to peer nations, and such expenditures will continue to rise in the future. Such trends will worsen the country’s growing debt and are explicitly challenging since they do not culminate into health outcomes improvements. The burgeoning healthcare costs could also hinder the healthcare system’s capacity to manage health crises, such as the Covid-19 effectively. In that way, it is increasingly essential for healthcare leaders to implement strategies to mitigate financial burdens related to care access and quality. As a nurse leader, I must constantly practice prudent financial management principles to meet resources constraints, including adequate staffing to enhance patient care outcomes. This implies that financial management knowledge significantly influences how I organize the available human resources, particularly during healthcare crisis contexts. That said, I will employ the staffing matrix to effectively account for all human resources, including potential discrepancies within the 30-bed medical-surgical unit. This report discusses the value of the staffing matrix within the healthcare setting and describes the staffing matrix, including necessary adjustments centered on patient census alterations. The paper will also include a variance plan and reallocation of resources to enhance staffing within the surgical unit.
Importance of Staffing Matrix in Health Care Setting
A staffing matrix is a tool that helps nurse leaders to determine the levels of the respective staff group needed based on the census. The staffing matrix is employed as a guideline for human resource management. Adjustments could be executed by considering patients’ needs as well as acuity. Charge nurses evaluate the staffing needs continuously and discuss with their leaders the need to make appropriate adjustments (Gan, 2020). In that context, the staffing matrix ensures that the patients’ needs effectively match with nurse competencies. Evidence reiterates that adequate staffing is associated with healthier work contexts, which could motivate nurses to offer a higher proportion of care hours than routine duties and improve patient outcomes (American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, 2018). One of the reasons for implementing the staffing matrix is to enhance patient outcomes. Research indicates a significant association between patient outcomes and nursing resources (Bettencourt et al., 2020). The staffing matrix provides a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio to ensure all patients are effectively attended to, thus improving treatment outcomes.
The staffing matrix also ensures a compelling human resources mix attending to the patients. This goes beyond the aspect of staffing numbers to emphasize the need to guarantee effective nurse teams. It reflects the degree to which nursing team members have the expertise and capacity to meet the care and treatment needs. The staffing matrix considers the number of personnel, the types of nurse professionals available, their practice experience, support staff availability, and team interdisciplinarity. Determining these types of nurses to attend to patients during a given timescale entails differentiating human resources as per their academic qualifications. Interdisciplinarity describes the degree to which different professionals are harnessed in a care group (Thériault et al., 2019). Support personnel constitutes a critical component determined within the nursing matrix since it improves nursing team efficiency by freeing members to attend to nursing tasks instead of administrative functions.
Description of the Staffing Matrix
The staffing matrix incorporates a daily census for the entire week in order to attain optimal hospitalization utilization within the 30-bed medical-surgical unit. This maximizes the percentage of bed usage at any time (bed occupancy rate), indicating my commitment to enhancing the healthcare facility’s performance (Siyoto et al., 2019). In this vein, the matrix attains the ideal 60-85 percent bed occupancy rate in the medical-surgical unit. The staffing matrix ensured the availability of enough personnel to offer services to the medical-surgical unit holistically (Thériault et al., 2019). Academic qualifications were considered in this matrix, as evidenced by the inclusion of registered nurses in the model. The shift length for the direct caregivers is 12 hours. The full-time equivalent (FTE) for direct caregivers’ coverage within a day is 4.7 FTEs. Fixed personnel within the medical-surgical unit includes the health unit coordinate, the nurse manager, and the charge nurse. In that way, specific parameters would greatly influence the medical-surgical unit staffing, including bed occupancy rate, the nurse-patient ratio, and the hours per patient day.
In the matrix, the patient census is 30, and it reduces by one every day to 26 patients on the fifth day. During the initial five days, the staffing needs include one fixed health unit coordinator per 12-hour shift, three nursing assistants (NAs) per 12-hour shift, and seven registered nurses (RNs) per 12-hour shift. Lastly, the staffing needs for the last two days indicate that the RNs and NAs were decreased to six and two, respectively. A critical look into the staffing matrix reveals an ideal nurse-patient ratio during the day and night shifts. Nurse-patient ratio and perfect bed occupancy rate were employed as measurement units to appraise patient satis...