Relevance of Nurse-Patient Ratios in Contemporary Healthcare Settings

Nurse-Patient Ratios Paper
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Nurse-Patient Ratios Paper
Introduction
Nurses are an important component of the healthcare system. Appropriate nurse-patient staffing ratios constitute an important variable influencing the delivery of high-quality and safe care to positively impact patients’ care outcomes. Staffing affects the capacity of nurses to offer high-quality and safe care at the practice level as well as in diverse practice settings. The multifaceted nature of nursing care delivery makes determining the ideal nurse-patient staffing ratios increasingly complex. The solution does not entail simply recruiting nurses above what is needed. Although the nurse staffing issue is increasingly complex, it remains solvable. It challenges healthcare administrators to design and implement dynamic solutions adaptable to the constantly changing healthcare delivery framework. This report discusses the relevance of nurse-patient ratios in contemporary healthcare settings, applies the ethical principle to the issue under investigation, and specifies the ethical provision supporting my view. The paper also includes an evaluation of the basic organizational and systems leadership for quality care and patient safety as it relates to the issue. The last portion assesses the core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice applicable to the patient experiencing nurse-patient ratios.
Relevance of Nurse-Patient Ratios in Today’s Healthcare Setting
Growing nurse-to-patient ratios are imperative issues explored in nursing. In order to meet the demand for healthcare services, hospitals are having difficulty. They are always looking for methods to reduce expenses and boost productivity. Hospitals have been lowering the number of nurses on staff as one method of doing this (Simonetti et al., 2022). The ratio of nurses to patients has risen as a result. The issue with this is that it might result in a decline in the standard of care. Nurses discharge a vital role in preserving patient safety when providing care. Experienced registered nurses (RNs) have shown a correlation between the greater incidence of patient falls, diseases, prescription mistakes, and even mortality and insufficient nurse staffing levels (Cho et al., 2020). Because hospitals massively reduce their nursing budgets, coupled with problems presented by a rising nursing shortage, fewer nurses opt to work longer hours and provide care to patients (Carthon et al., 2019). Hence these circumstances compromise care and add to the nursing deficiency by producing an environment that pushes nurses from the bedside.
Aiken et al. (2018) assert that hospitals can determine their safe staffing benchmarks in most states. Safe nurse staffing levels are becoming more widely recognized as crucial to patient care and the development of the nursing profession. Support for minimum nurse staffing requirements imposed by the state and the federal government has recently increased. California was the first state to endorse legislation in 2004 requiring an average nurse-to-patient ratio. California’s criteria for medical-surgical units, the nurse-patient proportion is one nurse to every five patients. Hospitals that have been granted Medicare certification are required by federal law 42CFR 482.23(b) to maintain a sufficient staff of RNs and other healthcare providers to offer the nursing care patients need (McHugh et al., 2021). Every nursing unit should have a nurse to guarantee prompt availability for bedside care for patients. It is up to each state to decide how to guarantee staffing is appropriate to patients’ needs without providing a precise number.
Ethical Principle that Supports Nurse-Patient Ratios
The ethical principle of nonmaleficence, which requires nurses to avoid harming others, applies to nurse staffing. Inadequate staffing leads to poor patient outcomes, medical mistakes, and burnout which causes raised mortality rates. Inadequate staffing levels accidentally violate the nonmaleficence principle because nurses do not commit enough time to one patient due to insufficient time and pressure to meet unit care goals. When nurses provide care hurriedly because they have to attend to several other patients, it can lead to errors in the prescription of drugs or the wrong dosage given to the patient. The more nurses there are, the better the patient safety result will be in terms of nurse staffing. A higher standard of care can be offered when there is sufficient staff to handle the number of patients (Cho et al., 2020). The nurses could concentrate on the patients, keep a careful eye on their health, conduct assessments as they ought to, and give prescriptions on schedule. It is expected that errors, patient complications, mortality, nursing weariness, and nurse burnout will all go down, thus augmenting nurse job satisfaction and patient satisfaction. This enables applying the not harm (nonmaleficence) principle.
Staffing is a process and structure that impacts patients’ safety outcomes, including the nurses and other healthcare professionals. Institutions implementing the safety culture should recognize ideal nurse-patient ratios as an integral part of realizing the objectives of patient safety as well as quality outcomes. Accordingly, maintaining sufficient nurse-patient ratios ensures that the hospital has enough registered nurses contributing towards achieving the nonmaleficence principle. Specifically, registered nurses demonstrate the professional duty to report inappropriate staffing and unsafe conditions that negatively impact care safety and quality. In addition, such a person has the right to advocate for safe conditions and appropriate staffing ratios within the hospital without reprisal. In addition, the nonmaleficence principle ensures that the facility does not harm the patients by cultivating and implementing a culture geared at optimizing patient care safety and quality outcomes. In addition, the ethical principle empowers the healthcare organization to recognize that in addition to ensuring ideal nurse-patient staffing ratios, they must offer ancillary services and interprofessional support. These include but are not limited to (a) efficient and effective support services (e.g., laboratory and health informatics), (b) timely supervision, delegation, and coordination are required to optimize safety, and (c) enough time for patient documentation (Shin et al., 2018). The efforts mentioned above are central to preventing harm to the patients and thus guaranteeing better health outcomes.
American Nurses Association (ANA’s) Code of Ethics that Supports Nurse-Patient Ratios
ANA’s main federal main concern is promoting safe staffing. ANA backs a legislative model whereby nurses can customize staffing plans for every unit. Thus, this approach permit hospitals to create flexible staffing levels and account for modification that comprise of admissions number, amount of patient needs, the discharges and transfers in a shift, the nursing personnel experience level, the unit layout, and resources availability like ancillary personnel and technology (ANA, 2019). Despite insufficient nursing staffing, which adheres to ANA clause 2.1, most nurses uphold their duty to their patients. This clause emphasizes the nurse’s main accountability to the patient.
The nurse works hard to give patients opportunities to be involved in care planning, ensures that patients find the plans acceptable, and encourages their execution. However, nurses cannot follow ANA Provision 2.1 when they experience burnout due to long hours and a high patient-to-nurse ratio. So, according to ANA, the choice of how many patients a nurse should look after at once should be made individually, taking into account each patient’s particular needs. The ANA and like-minded groups encourage flexible staffing plans. In these models, nurses are empowered to design their staffing plans, publicly publish staffing statistics to...