Nurse Understaffing Problem Identification Essay
Nurse understaffing is a problem in different healthcare organizations, including . It is important to note that nurse understaffing usually leads to the nurses exhaustion because of the overtime work and to decreases in the quality of patient care. In addition, the necessity for registered nurse case managers as well as to address the problem of understaffing leads to resolving a range of financial or budget issues. From this point, it is necessary to discuss the approaches to financial management associated with the problem of nurse understaffing in the context of the recent scholarly literature in the field.
Nurse understaffing is directly associated with the financial management questions in such organizations as home health agencies. In their study of 2014, Backhaus and the group of researchers explored how nurse staffing could not only influence the quality of care but also affect the agencies costs (Backhaus, Verbeek, Rossum, Capezuti, & Hamers, 2014, p. 383). Such researchers as Martsolf, Auerbach, Benevent, Stocks, and Jiang (2014) also focused on examining the relationship of the nurse staffing and care quality with references to the spent costs. Therefore, these studies need to be discussed in detail to explain the factors associated with financial management in the situation of nurse understaffing.
The financial management in healthcare agencies depends on the number of hours in a nurses shift, on the overtime work, on the correlation between productivity and working hours, and on the time spent for caring one patient. Thus, nurse understaffing influences all these criteria. According to Backhaus et al. (2014), there is no direct relationship between nurse staffing and the quality of care, but there is a relationship between the staffing and the costs of the provided care. In their research, Martsolf et al. (2014) developed this idea and stated that costs associated with from understaffing could be avoided when the number of nurse staff increased. Thus, it is possible to expect decreases in inpatient costs associated with the delivery of care. Moreover, Martsolf and the group of researchers also noted that it is possible to observe the increases in the nurse salaries in the situation of understaffing as important financial implications for payers and hospitals (Martsolf, Auerbach, Benevent, Stocks, & Jiang, 2014, p. 982). In this context, studies indicate how such important issues as staffing, quality of care, and financial management can be related.
On the one hand, the information presented in the two articles can be discussed as connected with the question of patient care quality rather than financial management. However, on the other hand, the researchers provide reasonable conclusions regarding the impact of understaffing on both the quality of care and increases in the agencies costs. From this point, it is possible to apply the researchers findings to the discussed situation of nurse understaffing in a .
Referring to the information provided in the literature, it is important to conclude that the situation of nurse understaffing cannot be resolved with the focus on overtime pay or increased salaries for nurses who sign for more shifts. The most appropriate variant to address the problem with the focus on financial management is to organize an effective schedule for nurses to avoid overtime work and understaffing during night shifts. In this case, it is possible to hire more part-time nurses to decrease operational costs as a result of the analysis of the required number of working nurses in an agency.
Nurse understaffing should be viewed as a patient care problem. Thus, the issue of staffing can be addressed with the focus on effective human resource and financial management strategies in healthcare agencies.
