Custom essays on The Nursing Shortage: Risks of High Nurse-Patient Ratios

One of the most discussable issues of the modern health care system is the shortage of nurses. There are many parties who take part in the discussion, such as nurses themselves, physicians, administrators of hospital and clinics, politics, patients, media and general public.
Many researches and publications were dedicated to this subject and I’m going to use a few of them in this paper. They focus on the opportunities of access to the health care and also on the cost of it for the state budget.
According to Lopes (2007) it is not a surprise that the US urgently needs nurses.
According to the forecasts population of the United States will grow 18% by 2020, and an additional 50 million people will need healthcare services. Also it needs to be said that the population is aging, and that means also a higher demand for healthcare services. (Kendig, 2001, p.22)
Hospitals are being forced to curtail services despite increasing patient demand because of reported difficulties in filling nursing roles in critical care, emergency rooms, and operating rooms. (Kendig, 2001, p.22)
According to the estimations of the government, county will have 1 million available nurse vacancies by 2020. (p.9). Author also claims that about 20 percent of American citizens face the shortage of primary medical care staff nowadays.
Nursing shortages influence the health of the nation. Studies have demonstrated that higher rates of nurse staffing are associated with reductions in adverse patient outcomes (Aiken, Clarke, Sloane, Sochalski, & Silber, 2002)сгыещь уыыфны
Actually this trend of nursing shortage has started in the 1970s and it happened because women have obtained other career opportunities that just in nursing and teaching.
What may be the possible consequences of the shortages in the future years? Imagine the situation when there is strict order in the primary healthcare institutions, just a chaos, not all the patient receive the critical care they desperately need and vitally needed surgeries are delayed because of the work overload.
Unfortunately, it seems that the ones that are mostly affected by the future significant shortages are hospitals. Because it is known that qualified nurses are tend to change their positions in hospitals for the retail health clinics, because wages are higher there. Therefore hospitals have to employ temporary staff to fill nursing positions.
There are many factors that influence the nursing shortage, among them the aging of nursing professionals, the decline in the number of nursing students, and others. The health system is definitely in a dangerous situation.
The biggest dilemma of the nursing shortage issue is the question how the efficient and adequate supply of the nurses should be assessed. Also there is a debate about the list of minimally required skills that each nurse should have in order to be employed by the health case institution.
There are two possible approaches to resource allocation: economic and noneconomic.
Healthcare specialists define shortages in two ways: a need based approach and a ratio technique. The former identifies the number of professionals needed to perform certain tasks based on the judgment of a medical professional. The latter compares the current professional/population ratio to a projected future ratio, and identifies a difference as a shortage. A variant of the latter is the one used by the Office of Shortage Designations, which identifies health professional shortage areas. U.S. policy has been to increase supply by subsidizing the training of medical personnel if they subsequently work a period in the shortage area. (Mennick, 2007, p.22)
But I need to draw your attention to the fact that this method of calculation doesn’t include wage and price elements. On the contrary, the economic approach indicates that there is a shortage if quantity demanded is greater than the quantity supplied at the market price and it analyses wages and process as well as other factors.
Let’s start the detailed overview of the nursing shortage with its background analysis.
Nursing shortage: the background of the problem
It’s important to understand the background, the nature of these shortages in order to be able to suggest some suitable solutions.
The issue itself has a complex nature and it’s very serious because people’s lives depend on it. Society should pay substantial attention to this problem. We should do our best to solve it because otherwise the results of the nurse shortage in the long-term perspective may be dreadful.