NUR 412 - Nursing Trends: Analyzing Shortage & Aging Population Impact

This essay examines current nursing trends, primarily focusing on the nursing shortage and the increasing elderly population. The nursing shortage is attributed to factors like hospital acuity, unfavorable work environments, and an aging workforce, leading to increased organizational costs and compromised patient care. The essay highlights how nurse shortages contribute to medication errors and unattended patient needs. The shift towards an aging population necessitates specialized nursing care to manage chronic conditions and provide home-based support. The author's clinical experiences illustrate the challenges and requirements associated with caring for elderly patients with multiple chronic illnesses, emphasizing the need for comprehensive care plans.

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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.

There is another trend wherein population is shifting to having a large number of elderly people.
In the US, the proportion of aged people in the total population is mounting at a very fast rate. In
accordance with the Administration on Aging, by 2040 peopled aged 65+ are anticipated to
compose almost 22% of the total US population, compared to 14.5% in 2014. This shift in
population has significant repercussions for various aspects of our society, but in particular for
the healthcare sector — and especially for nurses. The elderly people have particular health
requirements which nurses are obliged to expect and adjust to accommodate and ascertain
optimal patient outcomes. Some of these include: A need for home-based care and occurrence of
multiple chronic conditions (Lehnert, et. al 2011). During my practicum, I noted that most of the
elderly people undergoing treatment were suffering from various chronic disorders such as
diabetes, arthritis, asthma, and cystic fibrosis among others. Managing these chronic illnesses
successfully requires nurses to have a robust awareness of possible behavioral changes, potential
side effects, strategies for easing pain, as well as medication interactions needed. Besides, since
the older adults might no longer be able to handle tasks related to patient conformity, they often
require more in-home healthcare (Zhang, McCullagh, Nugent, Zheng, & Baumgarten, 2011). In
one of the health centers I visited, I was informed that older people undergoing home-based
treatments need assistance with diet and meal planning and preparation, organizing pills, simple
physical therapy exercises, and other necessities of their care plan.

References
Administration on Aging, (2018). 2017 Profile of Older Americans. Retrieved from:
https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/
2017OlderAmericansProfile.pdf
Haddad, L. M., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2019). Nursing shortage. In StatPearls [Internet].
StatPearls Publishing.
Lehnert, T., Heider, D., Leicht, H., Heinrich, S., Corrieri, S., Luppa, M., ... & König, H. H.
(2011). Health care utilization and costs of elderly persons with multiple chronic
conditions. Medical Care Research and Review, 68(4), 387-420.
Penoyer, D. A. (2010). Nurse staffing and patient outcomes in critical care: a concise
review. Critical care medicine, 38(7), 1521-1528.
Zhang, S., McCullagh, P., Nugent, C., Zheng, H., & Baumgarten, M. (2011). Optimal model
selection for posture recognition in home-based healthcare. International Journal of
Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 2(1), 1-14.