Nursing Term Paper Ashford General Hospital Final

Ashford General Hospital Final
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Institution
Executive Summary
Ashford General Hospital Final
Introduction
The United States’ healthcare sector is experiencing an alarming shortage of nurses with the trend expected to worsen going into the future. The escalating healthcare problem is characteristic of factors such as the high turnover rates as a result of poor working conditions and low job satisfaction among nurses, an aging nursing labor force, and lack of an effective recruitment and nursing replacement strategies. Like many other healthcare facilities in the United States, Ashford General Hospital experiences its fair share of the negative effects of the nursing shortage. Among the adverse repercussions witnessed at the hospital include low retention rates on nurses, aging nursing stuff, and over-exhaustion among the nurses. The hospital’s interventional measures are further stretching its resources while registering poor results in the delivery of quality care to its patients. An analysis of some of the best practices and solutions to the problem of nursing shortage as applied in five other healthcare facilities in the U.S. provide a framework for proposing and developing both an effective and comprehensive interventional measure at the healthcare facility.
Statement of the Problem
Ashford General Hospital has a bed capacity of 263 patients with over fifty years in California’s healthcare sector. The hospital provides the only 24-hour emergency department within the area of its location as well as an urgent care clinic offering its services even past the nurses’ working hours. The fact that the hospital provides the only emergency care services across the region creates an intense working environment that demands sufficient human resources to deal with the heavy workloads. However, Ashford General Hospital struggles with the challenges of the nursing shortage that affects its commitment to the delivery of safe and quality patient care. Currently, 68% of the nursing staff at Ashford is over the age of 45 and thus facing retirement in the near future. The facility further has a low retention rate on the primary care providers at 61%, which falls short of the 65% national retention rate on nurses. Hence, the hospital has a low nurse-patient ratio as a result of the nursing shortage, and future projections indicate a worrying trend due to lack of an effective interventional measure to prevent the looming crisis at the hospital. The low nurse-patient ratio leads to heavy workloads for the nurses who find the job both physically and emotionally demanding, which results in burnouts among the care providers. The hospital instituted interventional measures to curb the nursing shortage crisis at the facility by using per diem and traveling nurses on a contractual basis for the past two years. The intervention served to offset the heavy workload on the residential nurses who remained on duty while others took their medical leaves and staff vacations. The short-term intervention, however, resulted in higher expenditures on personnel costs and lowered patient satisfaction from the surveys conducted on the quality of services offered at the hospital.
As the CEO of the hospital, I am tasked with the mandate of coming with a proposal for the effective long-term intervention against the nursing shortage at the facility and its subsequent effects on the organization’s financial expenditures. The first step in developing a long-lasting solution to the problem entails a comprehensive analysis of the contributing factors to the problem of nursing shortage at the healthcare organization. The second step involves outlining some of the solutions and best practices embraced by other healthcare facilities in the United States. A stakeholder analysis of two of the best solutions from benchmarking the five healthcare facilities in the country serves to identify the most suitable solution to the problem of the nursing shortage and its negative effects at Ashford General Hospital.
Contributing Factors to the Nursing shortage at Ashford General Hospital.
It is evident that the majority of the nursing staff at Ashford General Hospital is close to the retirement age with 68% of all the primary care providers aged 45 years and above. A projection by the Health Resources and Services Administration reiterates on the hospital’s aging staff with over a million registered nurses expected to retire in the next ten years. A significant proportion of the nurses at Ashford is nearing the retirement age and thus further posing a potential challenge to the facility’s human resource department. The hospital also has a lower retention rate of nurses compared to that of the nation, which highlights some negative underlying factors in the working nursing work environments at the hospital. The heavy workloads, posed by the emergency care services provided at the regional facility, ranks among the key factors contributing to the high rate of turn-overs among the nurses at the organization. The physical and emotional burnouts from the heavy workloads due to the hospital’s low nurse-patient ratio leads to high-stress levels among the nurses, which results in low job satisfaction. The negative effect on job satisfaction among the nurses drives them out of the profession as they seek comfort in other occupations in the region and around the nation.
Low enrollment in both the region’s and nationwide nursing programs also plays a significant role in contributing to the nursing shortage experienced at the hospital. According to the American Association of Nursing Colleges, approximately 64, 000 applicants qualifying for enrollment into both the baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs across various institutions were turned down due to insufficient learning infrastructure to handle the large capacity of nursing students. The shortage of nursing faculties and learning infrastructure at both the regional and national levels lead to a proportionate shortage of qualified and skilled registered nurses in healthcare facilities such as Ashford General Hospital. Financial constraints in healthcare facilities across the nation also serve as an impediment to providing expected and valuable incentives to the nursing profession, which also leads to high turn-overs among nurses at Ashford General Hospital and other facilities around the nation.
Solutions Implemented at Five other Hospitals in the United States
* Cultural Transformation within Healthcare Facilities
An effective cultural organization of healthcare facilities is crucial to maintaining a positive attitude among nurses as it focuses on appreciating the vital services provided by the nursing profession. Embracing a positive culture in the nursing environment involves the implementation of support mechanisms to the nurses as they strive to discharge their duties under the extreme pressures of heavy workloads and demanding patients. The support systems serve to relieve the nurses of the physical and emotional stress from carrying out their duties and enhances their sense of belonging as they feel appreciated for their dedicated efforts in providing quality health care services to their patients. San Antonio Community Hospital, located in here in California, runs a concierge service to assist with the nurses’ errands at home. The positive cultural change at the hospital provides nurses running the 12-hours shift with services ranging from dry cleaning, laundry, as well as packaging and mail delivery service. The nurses have enough time to rest as the healthcare facility takes care of their errands. Such initiatives lead to job satisfaction among the nurses and reflect positively through the low turnover rates and the delivery of quality services. In essence, the interventional measure serves as an additional benefit to the nursing staff and may double as a recruitment incentive to prospective nurses.
* Supporting Nursing Education
Nursing education faces both infrastructural and financial challenges which limit the number of individuals joining the profession. Healthcare facilities have put measures in place to overcome the challenges by coming with effective alternatives to the problem by either opening faculties within their facilities or providing grants and scholarships to nurses seeking to advance their education CITATION Meh17 \l 1033 (Mehdaova, 2017). Some facilities even got to the extent of providing tuition fees to nurses seeking higher knowledge in the nursing profession in return for committing to work for the organization. The University of Wisconsin, for instance, launched a $3.2 million initiative in 2014 to provide waivers on loans for prospective nursing students who commit to teach within the state upon their graduation. The initiative dubbed, Nurses for Wisconsin, seeks to curb the projected nursing shortage in the State. Such programs also function to overcome the financial challenges facing a majority of the nurses seeking to advance themselves in the nursing profession and thus providing a pool of qualified professions within the state’s faculties. However, the initiative requires collaborative efforts among all the stakeholders involved.
* Improving Work Environments
Enhancing the working environment for nurses has an equally positive outcome of reducing the rising cases of physical and emotional burnouts, increased job satisfaction, and low turnover rates CITATION Lee13 \l 1033 (Lee, 2013). Improving the workin...