Describe the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected and its impact on your organization.
As mentioned, the shortage of healthcare professional is become one of the national health challenges not only in various states in the US but also across many countries of the world. This was exacerbated by the outbreak of coronavirus.
The increased number of patients posed a lot of challenges to the already suffering healthcare facilities.
As per the respect conducted, the primary cause of increased issues of nurse shortage in various healthcare organizations can be attributed to a progressive increase in the number of retiring and nursing burnout (Haddad, Annamaraju, & Toney-Butler, 2022).
As provided by the AACN, the average age for nursing staff is 50 years old.
Even if this does not necessarily mean it’s the required age for retirement, studies have indicated that the emergence of new technologies that are too complex for the old nursing workforce has greatly impacted nurses’ and other healthcare professionals’ decision to demand early retirement than expected.
This aspect has highly contributed to the lack of enough healthcare professionals in various departments thereby making it impossible for healthcare organizations to provide reliable, effective, and quality services to the public. Other factors include increased levels of care for patients due to the surging number aging population, shortage of nursing shortage, and restrictive healthcare legislation among many other factors (Bourekba, 2020).
It must be understood that the lack of enough healthcare professionals has led to numerous challenges in many healthcare organizations. These impacts spread across public and private healthcare facilities in the united states and other parts of the world. Among the major impacts of nurse, shortage includes increased cases of patient death due to errors arising from fatigued staff. Recent studies have shown that one of the factors contributing to low mortality in any healthcare facility s the richness of the registered staff mix.
When nurses are overworked, patients suffer a big blow because they are often overlooked (Bourekba, 2020).
The shortage of nurses since the beginning of covid 19 has also led to a rise in nurse burnout. In 2019, when the world pandemic struck the entire world, many nurses were forced to work for extra time to enable healthcare facilities to cope with the increased number of covid 19 patients admitted.
The shortage of nurses has led to various unnecessary medical errors. This has resulted in the untimely deaths of many patients whose lives could have been saved.
Recent studies show that on an annual basis, over 251, 000 deaths occur in the united states alone due to factors attributed to medical errors.
The shortage of nurses has also led to a continued increase in morbidity. When the nurse-patient ratio is higher than the set standard, then many nurses feel overworked, demotivated, and dissatisfied with their work and aspect that in turn contributes to increased number of nurses leaving nursing for other better careers (Bourekba, 2020).