Nursing Trends

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Nursing Trends
One of the commonest trends is nursing shortage and it is being instigated by various reasons
such as hospital acuity, unfavorable workloads and work environments, aging workforce, and
aging population (Haddad, & Toney-Butler, 2019). Healthcare organizations in the United States
are encountering an increasing demand for nursing specialists whilst the supply is very minimal.
The impact of nursing shortage on nursing practice today is substantial in terms of the effects on
organisational expenditures and in relation to quality and continuity of patient care offered.
Nursing shortage has deprived the healthcare setting of vital tools for developing cost-effective
and quality health care. For instance, during my clinical rotations I noted that nurse shortage
contributes to increased mistakes, delayed medications, patient calls going unattended, and
impacting nursing practice. In a situation of minimal levels of nurse staffing, bedsores, hospital
acquired infections, wrong drug dozes, patient falls, and other avoidable issues are very common
(Penoyer, 2010). Failure to take in hand and address the issue of nursing shortage thus leads to
failure to reduce hospital expenditures, failure to lessen the rates of poor patient complications or
outcomes, as well as considerable psychological and financial expenses to patients and their
families. The options available to nursing managers experiencing nursing shortage range from
enlisting impermanent cover staff from an external agency or internal bank to doing nothing so
that workloads of remaining staff are increased and thus burning out, by juggling with available
staff through transferring employees.