NURS 6053 DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES

Healthcare organizations have competing needs because of the limited resources and reforms. The Quadruple Aim framework as well as innovative delivery models like value-based care implore providers to develop effective interventions to address these competing needs. Nursing shortage is a health care stressor or issue that implores organizations to develop policies and practices to tackle it and guarantee quality care outcomes (Koopmans et al., 2018). This paper focuses on the competing needs emanating from nursing shortage and development of relevant policies or practices. The paper also critiques the policy for ethical considerations, explains its strengths and challenges in ethics promotion.  

Review Of Nursing Shortage As Healthcare Stressor 

Nursing shortage has significant implications on the quality of care that providers offer. Nurses are frontline care providers and first point of contact between patients and the healthcare system (Mattioni & Wilson, 2018). The first competing need that can impact nurse shortage are the financial needs of nurses in these organizations which contradicts the institution’s focus on profits or return on investment. The second need is patients attaining bet healthcare services as they pay for them and are entitled to quality. The need contradicts the one for nurses as it means that they must be willing to serve patients but are not well compensated. Further, their workload becomes more because of the shortage. They do not feel well remunerated for the efforts and are demotivated yet patients want quality care irrespective of their situation.  

Relevant Policy Influencing The Stressor 

The current organizational policy and practices of hiring new-graduated nurses is one of the issues contributing to the nurse shortage in the facility. The organization adopted this policy as a means of reducing the overall cost of running the facility because new-graduated nurses want experience and getting their first job is a significant anticipation as they want to gain experience as providers (Perry et al., 2018). However, as they get new and greener opportunities in other organizations, they leave leading to a significant workload for the remaining care providers who experience burnout. Eventually, they also leave and the problem is does not get a solution.  

Policy Critique 

The current policy does not promote ethical values and principles of healthcare, especially the biomedical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice as well as autonomy. The policy fails to consider these ethical values for patients and even providers. The policy should ensure that the hired nurses are compensated well instead of giving them low wages leading to high turnover rates. The policy does not promote any ethical values as it exposes patient to low quality due high turnover rate.  

Recommendations 

The current policy can be effective if it focuses on hiring newly-graduated nurses and training them sufficiently so that they do not leave the organization. These new nurses should be motivated and inspired through good compensation, incentives, and leadership support to retain them. The competing needs should not be the ultimate determiners but quality of care and the retention of best and well-trained providers (Milliken, 2018). The change will ensure that nurses and patients interact and have quality services for mutual benefit and respect. 

Conclusion 

Nurse shortage is a critical healthcare stressor that needs effective strategies and approaches to address. Low nurse staffing levels threaten the quality of care and patient safety. Therefore, organizations, like ours, should develop effective interventions to ensure patient safety and quality of care.  

References 

Koopmans, L., Damen, N. & Wagner, C. (2018). Does diverse staff and skill mix of the team’s