Contemporary Nursing Issue

Running head: CONTEMPORARY NURSING ISSUE
CONTEMPORARY NURSING ISSUE
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CONTEMPORARY NURSING ISSUE
Executive Summary:
Nurse staffing enhances the delivery of safe and quality care to the patients. Nurse staffing
should be appropriate by allocating Registered Nurses (RN) who has proper knowledge and
expertise in delivering the right care to the patients. An insufficient supply of nurses with lack
of expertise can lead to morality of patients in some cases. In order to offer quality care
services to patients, nurse-to-patient ratio must be maintained. This is because if a nurse is
more than the capacity assigned to patients, it will be difficult for the Registered Nurse (RN)
to provide patients with the highest quality of care. There is evidence that nursing staff, their
education and work environment are linked to mortality of patients. This paper focuses on
this issue and how it affects people and shows the probable interventions that can be used to
address the problem.

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CONTEMPORARY NURSING ISSUE
Introduction:
The delivery of quality care to the hospitalised patients is complicated and requires a
coordinated effort by health care experts including physicians, health staffs, medical
supervisor, Registered Nurse (RN), advance practice nurse and other health care
professionals. They, together, identifies the problem, build a strategy to solve the problem,
build and manage resources that are required. Hospitals capacity to operate and manage these
problems efficiently is depended on how the problem is identified, strategy to solve the
problem, teamwork, managing difficulties and changing stressors. The shortage of nurse
availability is recognised as a critical stressor in hospitals. The insufficient supply of nurses
in hospitals can be due to various factors like raising demand of nurses, demographic changes
in the RN, little growth in RN wages and another important factor can be stressful working
environment that makes it difficult for the nurses to work. A contemporary issue that has
made its entry to the health care sector is the supply of insufficient nurse thus hampering the
nurse to patient ratio. The paper talks about this issue and how low nurse staffing in acute
care centres compromises with providing quality care to the patients and also shows
strategies to manage the problem.

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CONTEMPORARY NURSING ISSUE
Discussion:
Hospitals are currently under pressure to improve their quality in delivering correct
treatment and quality care to patients to maintain high quality standards. Some hospitals have
developed the use of different clinical pathways to govern the process resulting into an
impressive outcome. However, the type of quality treatment the patients receives are entirely
provided by medical practitioner including RNs with the flexibility of supplying personalised
care to patients. There has been a growing need for RNs in hospitals and health care centres
and inadequate supply of nurses can lead to hindrance in providing quality care to the
patients. The safety of patients are directly proportional to the size and knowledge or
expertise of the nurse workforce. There has been a deterioration in quality care because
hospital did not keep up with the increasing demand of nurses ("OJIN: The Online Journal of
Issues in Nursing", 2019). These situations has led to the foundation of enactment and
authorizations considering regulatory measures to ensure adequate staffing in the hospitals.
These regulatory measures allocate a minimum staffing standard that is to be met by all
hospitals irrespective of the patient's type and severity. The first state that enacted the
minimum nurse to patient ratio in hospitals was California in 1999 (Buerhaus et al., 2007).
There are care standardization procedures applied in healthcare settings to ensure the
quality of care they are imparting to patients are safe and consistent for both the patient and
nurse or the health care providers because of which poor treatment resulting into creating
poor reputation of the hospital lawsuits can come into play. Even some high quality hospitals
faces challenges while delivering high quality care. In carrying out an innovative and
improved intervention for the successful outcome of quality care service is the importance of
staffing in health care units (Tabrizi & Gharibi, 2019).