Effects of Low Staffing on Patients

The various companies which have carried out the necessary researches indicated that quality care and patient safety can only be ensured when there is proper staffing which covers the two major issues. Quality of care can be determined when there is nursing sensitivity which may also be defined as family care giver condition or state. Some of the worst outcomes that have been experienced include urinary track infections in patients, upper gastrointestinal bleeding and prolonged stay at the hospital by patients. Other implications of poor patient care include rescue failures where a patient ends up dying, pneumonia, one month mortality as well as shock. The research which has been done has mainly focused on the negative aspects which are easily documented instead of positive aspects of the simple care that patients receive (Hockenberry et al 210).

Many of the researches that were conducted by medical practitioners related worse patients outcome to poor nurse staffing.  One of the conclusions that were made was that adverse patient conditions like nosocomial infections were as a result low nurse to patient ratio. These results are applicable to nursing units as well as hospitals. The only thing that was not brought to light was how low staff rate contributes to increased mortality rate in the hospitals. The rates of adverse outcome in patients differ from hospital to hospital and even in the type of the patient. For example urinary track infections are very common in patients that have undergone surgery. The last ten years have not been smooth for United States hospitals as well as nurses. This is because news headlines were mainly about understaffing at the American hospitals as well as nurse shortage (Hatfield and broadribb 245).

Nurses have been raising alarms all over that the numbers of nurses at hospitals are not sufficient to provide the need patient care and safety. Doctors as well as other medical practitioners agreed with what nurses were saying. Manly physicians admitted that poor hospital care was a result of understaffing. Nurses attribute nurse shortage to excessive workloads that nurses have to handle. Research that was carried basing on workload indicated that about forty percent of all nurses have extremely high burnouts level than any other public servants. Another factor that greatly contributed to poor staffing at the hospital include job dissatisfaction which is about four times more than, that of any other US civil servant (Pudner 1991).

Job dissatisfaction as well as excessive workloads has forced many qualified registered nurses to change their nursing profession to other professions which are not much demanding. Statistics that were carried out indicated that one in five nurses was planning to quit there profession within a period of ten years. In 1999 a legislation to guide the ratio of patients to nurse was passed in California and it was to be effected after some four years. This legislation was passed on the basis that poor staffing was causing lower patient turnout. Some of the ratios that were recommended included three to ten patients for the nurses that were working in the surgical units. On addition to that the Californian government went a head and announced that six medical and surgery patients were to be served with at least one registered nurse (Stanton 2).

Conclusion

These ratios were to be further increased at the enactment of the new policy to one to five nurse patient ratio. This was basically done to avoid losing nurses to other profession as well as to improve patient’s outcome and the medical care of patients. It’s evident that poor stuffing negatively affects nurses as well as patients that are admitted at the hospitals. The causes of low staffing have been dealt with analytically in this research papers. For instance factors like poor pay as well as excessive workload has made many nurses to quit or rather change their nursing profession. On the other hand poor patient turnout as well as adverse infections and increased mortality rates among patients has been related to lower staffing which results to poor patient care that exposes patients to many risky situations. There are diseases that patients have reportedly to have developed as a result poor nursing and a good example of such diseases include urinary tract infections in surgery patients (Swansburg and Swansburg 108).