Specific Competing Needs That May Impact Physicians And Nursing Shortage
The workforce needs may impact the national healthcare issue on physicians and nurses’ shortage. The workforce accounts for the greatest percentage of recurrent health expenditure in healthcare settings (Nancarrow, 2015). Gradually, shortages in the healthcare workforce correspond with the increasing demands on the healthcare system and continuing growth in healthcare expenditure. Physicians and nurses’ shortage not only limit healthcare accessibility but are crucial factors in patient care quality and safety (Marć et al., 2019). Accessible health services require sufficient numbers of physicians and nurses to meet population needs. However, there are various reasons that the physicians and nurses do not meet population needs, which are primarily from workforce shortages.
Physicians’ and nurses’ shortage is distinguished in four concepts: professional standards, projected future, static economic, and dynamic economic shortages. The common cause of the shortage is attributed to the professional standards shortages (Marć et al., 2019). This concept evaluates the level by which actual nurse staffing falls short of the desired level as per the profession’s preexisting standards.
Impacts And How Policy Address These Competing Needs
Health policy on a flexible workforce may address the competing human resource needs. A flexible workforce can enhance healthcare accessibility by guaranteeing timely responses to physicians and nursing shortages (Nancarrow, 2015). It can help solve workforce shortages and enhance patient-centered care. For instance, a policy can be formulated, eliminating the lengthy and expensive training regimes used to train most health professionals. Most health practitioner courses require students to undergo several hundred hours of supervised clinical training, which are often expensive for students, training institutions, and supervisors (Nancarrow, 2015). A policy can be enacted that entails a change from the time-based achievement of qualifications to the incremental achievement of specific competencies.
Flexible training models can be introduced, such as step-on, step-off programs, which allow for the incremental credentialing of practitioners by offering several exit points throughout the professional training course (Nancarrow, 2015). This will mean that employees have a marketable skill that can respond to the context in which they work. It can also ensure that more individuals enroll in nursing and medical programs and facilitate faster graduation of physicians and nurses, which will increase the workforce in the long run.
Increasing healthcare costs signify that hiring and training more healthcare professionals of the same kind is not a sustainable solution to staff shortage. Therefore, innovative solutions are required to utilize the existing human resources more efficiently (Nancarrow, 2015). A policy can address shortages by removing barriers to service delivery. For example, the acute physician and nursing shortage in rural areas can be addressed by policies that eliminate legal and professional barriers to practice to support flexible service delivery.
Health policy can be formulated to allow practitioners to work to their full scope of practice and delegate tasks where required. For instance, the physicians’ and nurses’ shortage can be addressed in the US by states allowing NPs to work to their full scope of practice (Nancarrow, 2015). NPs are trained and equipped with skills to take health history, perform physical exams, interpret diagnostic tests, diagnose, and prescribe treatment. However, only a few states have a full practice for NPs despite their academic qualifications. The policy can thus address physicians’ shortage by allowing NPs to practice to their full scope leaving physicians to attend to complex medical cases beyond NPs’ scope of practice.