Interprofessional Organization & System Leadership Essay

Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics. Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies Developing Organizational Policies and Practices essay. Be specific and provide examples. Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations. Interprofessional Organization & System Leadership Essay

It is undeniable that the need for health care services is rapidly growing, especially in the face of aging populations, population increases, and improving health care capabilities that have placed a strain on the available health care resources. Of significant concern in efforts to address the increasing need of health care services and strain on resources is the nurse staffing shortage as this leads to higher incidences of errors, and mortality and morbidity rates. With low patient-nurse ratios, it is understandable for patients to experience higher failure to rescue rates and nurses to experience dissatisfaction and burnout. It is not uncommon for a medical facility with staffing concerns to reschedule or cancel scheduled produces because of a shortage of staff or lack of capacity. These concerns highlight the need for policy interventions to address the issue of nurse staffing shortage (Ellis & Bach, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the peripheral issues of importance that would impact the policy intervention efforts targeted at addressing the issue of nurse staffing shortage. Interprofessional Organization & System Leadership Essay

Competing needs impacting nurse staffing shortage

There are two competing needs that impact nurse staffing. The first competing need is financial concerns and the need to maintain good financial health in terms of reporting profits and the ability to maintain services. Like other business organizations, medical facilities are under increasing pressure from investors to cut costs and report higher profits. This pressure has caused the majority of medical facilities to focusing on staffing cuts as a cost saving measure with a view to having leaner staffs. In essence, hiring more nurses implies increasing the budget and this ends up affect other budget items so that the facility reports deficits and insufficient resources to maintain service levels (Black, 2020). In this respect, financial concern is a competing need since it seeks to reduce spending and yet hiring more nurses to address the shortage would increase spending.

The second competing need is the increasing shift towards technologies that can be leveraged to improve health care performance and delivery. This is especially true for information technologies and systems such as Telehealth that is increasingly being touted as the next step in health care evolution. These technologies address health care access concerns by eliminating the need for clerical and administrative roles in health care delivery. In addition, they eliminate concerns about distance and commute as medical personnel do not necessarily have to be physically present where the patient is in order to provide care. The shift towards technology has caused more financial resources to be spent on these technologies in anticipation of the health care evolution so that less financial resources are available for staffing concerns (Lau &Kuziemsky, 2016). In this respect, shift towards technology is a competing need since more financial resources would be spent on technology and yet these resources are required for hiring more nurses. Interprofessional Organization & System Leadership Essay

Relevant policy/practice that may influence nurse staffing shortage

Patient safety policies have an influence on nurse staffing. The organization understands that nurse staffing is important to the delivery of high quality patient care since nurses are an important component of the health care delivery system. The organization calculates nurse staffing at the operational levels (for specific divisions, departments and units), within specific timeframes (night, day and weekend shifts). This results in average measures offering an imprecise idea of the specific conditions of patients and nurses at any particular time. Staffing levels differ for the different operational units to reflect the differences in illness severity and patient populations, as reflections of nursing care needs. In essence, the nursing policy is managed on a shift-by-shift, day-by-day and unit-by-unit basis (Huston, 2014). In addition, the policy divides the available quantity of nursing services and nurses by the quantity of patient care services. This results in patient-to-nurse ratios for the operational areas within the facility. The concern with this policy approach to nurse staffing is that it underestimates and overestimates nursing workloads in some operational units. The result is that more attention is being offered to some patients in relation to their health conditions and care needs, and clinical trajectories across the units over time (Mason et al., 2020). Interprofessional Organization & System Leadership Essay