Nursing Shortage and Nurse Turnover: Effective Leadership and Management Interventions

Running head: NURSING SHORTAGE AND NURSE TURNOVER
NURSING SHORTAGE AND NURSE TURNOVER
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NURSING SHORTAGE AND NURSE TURNOVER
Nursing shortage can be defined as the situation where the healthcare industry lacks
adequate amount of skilled nurses required for providing quality care to the patients. The needs
and requirements of the patients cannot be met successfully as the number of nurses required to
provide them efficient and sufficient care are quite less than required (Buerhaus et al., 2017).
Nurse patient ratio can be explained as the number of nurses allocated to the number of patients
for providing effective care. When the number of nurses is low and the numbers of patients are
higher, adequate quality and safe care cannot be provided to patients. These results in patient
dissatisfaction, unsafe services to patients, preventable errors, missed interventions, omissions
and many others. These can affect the health of the patients (Fischer, 2016). Therefore, the essay
will focus on how effective leadership and management interventions can help in overcoming the
nursing shortage and reduce nursing turnovers in the healthcare organizations. This assignment
will mainly show how effective leadership and management can handle the situation successfully
helping the healthcare industry to fight the issue.
One of the main causes that lead to nursing shortage is short staffing. The higher
authorities are seen to recruit less number of nurses with an expectation that such low nurses will
handle more patients and thereby try to save resources and increase the profit margin. However,
they remain ignorant about the risks and harms that might take place when there is less number
of nurses but more number of patients (Wu et al., 2016). When low number of nurses is expected
to care for more patients, they are burned out physically making them suffer from fatigue,
headache, backache, spondylitis, and metabolic disorders. They are drained out mentally and
emotionally that create stress in their lives. They also fail to meet appropriate work-life balance.
All these contribute to nurse turnovers making them leave their professions. Hence, the nursing

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NURSING SHORTAGE AND NURSE TURNOVER
leaders and managers need to lead and manage the present number of nurses in ways by which
they feel motivated and guide them to handle the stress effectively.
Often poor working conditions also leads to nursing turnovers thereby reducing the
number of nurses working for any organization. Lack of support from seniors and colleagues,
poor organizational culture, lack of proper resources and many others might contribute to poor
working conditions of the nurses (Snavely, 2016). This affects the morale of the nurses.
Therefore, leaders and managers need to develop effective strategies by which the working
conditions of the nurses in healthcare organizations can be developed. These would help to
retain the nurses reducing chances of nursing shortage.
One of another cause for nursing shortage is the lack of proper opportunities and
adequate resources for nursing research and education. Therefore, individual students do not
try to enter into the profession due to lack of promotion of the glorious features of the profession.
Moreover, individuals who have already become nurses might also become frustrated and leave
their professions if they do not get adequate opportunities in their career to enjoy growth.
Another cause is the aging nursing workforce. The rate at which the present nursing workforce
is ageing and retired is not running parallel with the number of students entering into the nursing
profession. Therefore, it is the duty of the nursing managers and the leaders to advocate the
issues to the higher authorities of the organizations as well as to the government. These would
help the government to realize how nursing shortage might affect the healthcare industry and
accordingly the life of the citizens in the nation (Twigg et al., 2014).
The main form of leadership that can help in overcoming the situation is transformational
leadership. Transformational leadership can be defined as the leadership approach that helps in