The Effect of Staff Nurse Shortage on Patients’ Care

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NRS1302
Understanding Research of Practice
Student name: Fatima Mohammed Al Saedi
FC1100094
Semester 1
2018-2019
1366 Words
The Effect of Staff Nurse Shortage on Patients’ Care

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Background
The number of staff nurses is a critical factor in determining factors that might affect the
quality of health care services in healthcare facilities (Daniela, 2013). Many studies
conducted on this topic argued that nursing shortage impedes the ability to practice nursing
care, affect professional ethics that guide nurses’ career, and put the lives of patients at risks.
Patients place their hopes on medical practitioners to get quality services and therefore when
nurses are working extra duties due to understaffed numbers, the risk of performing medical
errors increase which leads to alleviation of patients’ suffer (Hyeonmi & Kihye, 2018). For
example, performing low quality nursing care put the patients under risks of infections,
injuries, death, or they may even get discharged without proper education concerning how to
take care of their health conditions.
Various researchers have also affirmed that the presence of nurses increase the quality
of healthcare services offered in health facilities. When nursing workforce is understaffed,
patients might be risk of being challenged by illnesses because proper services are not
provided (Deborah, 2012). This is the reason why hospitals who have shortage in nursing
workforce report a high number of death rates than those equipped with a sufficient number
of these professionals (Lisa, 2015). The purpose of this study will be to identify the effects of
staff nurse shortage on patients’ care. The study question, in this case, will be “does nurse
shortage have effects on patient care?
Literature review
According to Jaymeen (2018), inadequate nurse staffing increases the risk of
preventable patient harm because it makes the hospital to lack workforce which can provide
the required healthcare series to the patients. The role of nurses is primarily to take care of
patients, an insufficient number of these professionals make patients to experience challenges

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because some of them have little understanding on how to take care of themselves when they
are sick (Hyeonmi & Kihye, 2018). For example, with the knowledge which nurses obtain
from the courses they attend, they are able to assist the patients to take medication as
prescribed by doctors, but when they are not present or are few, patients may lack people to
help them take these medications and end up taking the wrong dosage, hence putting their
lives at risk.
Deena and Olga (2016) asserted that understaffed nurses can lead to employee
burnout because being few will result in nurses working for long hours. Nurses who are
extremely exhausted, as a result of working for long hours, are prone to making mistakes
when it comes to patient care (Kurt, 2014). Some of these mistakes may include
administration of wrong medication dosage and wrong dressing of wounds.
In incidences where the ratio of nurses is too low as compared to patients, research
has indicated that patients are forced to remain in the health facilities for longer than
necessary (Deborah, 2012). The reason why this happens is that they fail to be monitored
from time to time as required, a factor which puts them at the risk of developing various
conditions such as bed sores and other serious medical issues.
Research methodology
The issue of understaffed nursing has been in existence for some years with some of
the hospitals using this strategy as one of the ways of cutting costs (Ruth, 2016). Although it
assists in cost minimization, it has various implications which may affect patients, nurses and
other stakeholders. To properly understand whether nurse understaffing put patients at risk,
the researcher conducted an investigation taking a target population of 7 respondent in a
national health centre. The reason for choosing the 7 nurses to be respondents was that the