Visit a Patient Care Unit. Critical Care Unit Manager

Patient Care Unit
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Institution
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Patient Care Unit
Write a 4-6 page paper following APA format comparing the two managers’ approaches for meeting the required staffing effectiveness standards. Which approach would you defend, and why?
While conducting the interviews, both managers appeared to be well aware of the Joint Commission’s Staffing Effectiveness Standards. However, their approaches towards meeting these standards are different, and this offers an opportunity to review the two and compare their effectiveness. The two units under study include the Critical Care Unit and the Pediatrics Unit. These units are quite distinct and have different patient-to-nurse ratios. Below is an elucidation of the managers’ approaches for meeting the required staffing effectiveness standards.
Critical Care Unit Manager
There are several stipulations in the Joint Commission’s Staffing Effectiveness Standards, and to help break down the managers’ approaches, each will be considered differently.
With regards to submitting annual reports on “all system or process failures, the number, and type of sentinel events, information provided to families/patients about the events, and actions taken to improve patient safety,” the Critical Care Unit manager prepares quarterly reports. These are then submitted to the hospital management at the end of every year. While explaining the criteria used above, the manager indicated that there are a lot of things to report on every day. So, preparing the reports quarterly and not annually helps to offer a clear picture of what is happening in the Critical Care Unit. Additionally, similar issues are categorized or grouped to help provide perspective on the specific issues outlined in the Joint Commission’s Staffing Effectiveness Standards. This approach according to the manager has helped ensure that relevant data on specific aspects or issues affecting the unit is collected.
It should be noted that staffing effectiveness standards appear to tie staffing and outcomes together. The assumption in the standards is that staffing plays a big role in patient outcomes. Well, the manager of the Critical Care Unit believes in this assumption and is keen on making sure that nursing shortages are not a major or contributing factor in patient outcomes within the unit. While giving a background story to the implementation of the standards, the manager indicated that there have been significant budget implications and that the nurse-to-patient ratio changed to the current 1:2. Nursing shortage is a common problem, and one of the ways of dealing with this issue is overtime. Aside from overtime, there is the use of casual nurses who are called upon when there are emergencies, and a unit needs to hire more nurses but on temporary basis. With regard to these two solutions to nursing shortage, the manager of the Critical Care Unit indicated that even though there have been debates to make overtime mandatory, nurses in his unit have voluntary overtime. This, she says takes the decision away from her. Additionally, she indicated that making overtime mandatory can lead to burnout as well as reduced productivity, which will, in turn, affect patient outcomes (Bradley University, 2019). Concerning casual nurses, she indicated that they are an option only when there are emergencies that overwhelm the nurses in rotation, and instances of burnout, fatigue, and stress start to be common among the current workforce.
Pediatrics Unit
There are similarities between the two managers in how they seek to meet the staffing effectiveness standards. First of all, with regards to preparing reports, the Pediatric Unit manager prepares annual reports and submits these to the patient safety program leadership. While annual reports can be problematic, the unit manager groups the issues which help to compartmentalize the data collected. Compartmentalization of data helps to paint a clear picture of certain issues as well as offer an opportunity for patterns to develop. So, the manager groups the data into several categories and provides an annual report of the same.
Compared to the Critical Care Unit, the pediatric unit appears to have a much bigger nurse-to-patient ratio at 1:4. One cannot say with utmost certainty that this ratio is ideal for a pediatrics unity because, as indicated by the American Nurses Association (2015), finding the right or ideal nurse-to-patient ratio is a big challenge. Douglass (2010) continues to say that in any hospital unit, changes with regards to complexities in staffing appear to happen in different ways. It could be shift to shift, hour to hour, or minute by minute. So, this means that regardless of a manager’s experience, it is nearly impossible to find the right or perfect ratio that guarantees positive patient outcomes.
However, regardless of the challenges indicated above, the Pediatrics Unit manager believes his approach to meet the staffing effectiveness standards works. One snippet of his approach involves overtime, which is mandatory. But, it is ...