FIU Nurse Workload Discussion

Please reply to the following posts:

Post 1

Nurses are from part of front-line healthcare workers that interact one on one with patient. As a result, the quality of health Care services that a hospital offers to its clients is directly dependent upon nurses. There is need to ensure that nurses are provided with the resources and adequate support to ensure their delivery of quality health care in their respective organizations.

According to research, the quality of healthcare service that has been offered by nurses depends on a number of external factors one of which is the workload. With an increased workload, nurses run into difficulties in ensuring they have provided quality healthcare services to their clients. This is because, such increased workloads result into crisis management, encourage missing of deadlines and other factors that leading to delivery of low-quality services in health care (Sultz & Young, 2018).

The main cause of increased workload for nurses understaffing. The models of staffing that are used by different organizations do not meet the needs of the nurses. To ensure that there is an effective nurse to patient ratio, the staffing needs of an organization should be critically assessed and increase or decrease the number of nurses accordingly. Other considerations that need to be made are the responsibility of nurses.

Currently, nurses are tasked with the responsibility of supervising the non-professional personnel in the hospital and this works to increase the workload assigned to them (Sultz & Young, 2018). By properly segmenting the health care system to allow nurses to indulge in their professional vocation of assisting in delivery of health care services to patients, it is possible to increase the morale of nurses and in turn, boost the quality of healthcare service delivery.

Post 2

The growth of hospitals and medical centers has affected nursing employment in many ways. In hospitals, the nursing position has increased the workload, and the consequences are negative, affect both nursing job satisfaction and patient safety, which contributes to a high turnover and shortage of nurses who have a large workload, so nurses may not have enough time to perform tasks that can have a direct effect on patient safety.

According to the textbook, many hospitals employ fewer nurses for inpatient care, but expect that in addition to fulfilling their jobs and maintaining clinically sophisticated nursing skills, they will supervise staff with less level of training to provide direct patient care and manage units with high rates of sick patients.

In many hospitals, nurses are expected to perform non-professional tasks, such as delivering and retrieving food trays, cleaning duties, transporting patients, commissioning, coordinating, or performing ancillary services.

There is definitely a great chance that these professionals will end up with a heavy workload and impaired morale, leading to possible burnout over time.

On the other hand, there has been a recent increase in the number of nursing graduates; some facilities offer attractive sign-on bonuses for recruit new graduates. Also, many nursing schools are adding accelerated programs as a way to get nurses into the workforce more quickly.

According to the book, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has projects to change the frustrating nursing work environment by altering both physical facilities and hospital cultures, aiming to decrease the number of time nurses spend non-nursing tasks to focus on the more satisfying responsibilities of maintaining the quality of patient care.

Post 3

Nurses are the largest health professional group in the health system. They are well-educated, highly skilled, and positively regarded by the patients and families they serve. Nurses play a key role in patient safety. Therefore, among organizational factors, the level of nursing staff, workload, and education are the most important elements associated with patient safety outcomes.

The heavy workload of hospital nurses is a major problem for the American healthcare system. Nurses are experiencing higher workloads than ever before due to many reasons, for example, increased demand for nurses, inadequate supply of nurses, reduced staffing and increased overtime, and reduced duration of the stay of the patients.

A heavy nursing workload adversely affects patient safety. Furthermore, it negatively affects nursing job satisfaction and, as a result, contributes to high turnover and a shortage of nurses. In addition to increasing patient acuity, work system factors and expectations also contribute to nurses’ workload. Nurses are expected to perform non-professional tasks, such as delivering and retrieving food trays; cleaning duties; transport patients; and commissioning, coordinating, or performing ancillary services.

Nursing overload arises from various sources. Overcapacity of patients in relation to available space in the bed is a common cause. Typically, inadequate staff availability is reported, due to inadequate referral staffing or lack of replacement of staff who are sick or on vacation.
Additionally, overcapacity issues are also a major cause of excessive workload. Overcapacity is a problem that exists in all health institutions, but it is perhaps more evident and more frequently identified in the emergency room.

Today’s nurses continue to experience high levels of burnout, absenteeism, turnover and fatigue, and lack of job satisfaction.