nursing
Read this article from this week’s Seattle Times WA Hospital workers filing safety complaints (Links to an external site.)
Also read this article Ratios-ANecessarySolutiontothePatientSafetyCrisisinUSHospitals.pdf
Write about what you have witnessed, what you have heard from friends and preceptors, and what you believe we need to do.
Consider California, which has mandatory ratios and a safe staffing law. Here’s one infographic, but you should research a bit too.
Answer these questions:
Are mandatory staffing ratios the answer?
What do you think it will take to pass them if so?
Would you be willing to go to Olympia? Strike? Advocate? How important is this?
Why does the hospital Association have “concerns” and are they valid?
What would the cost (monetary and downstream effect) be of this kind of law?
What would the benefits be other than decreased complaints?
You needn’t write a paragraph on every question, but try to hit the main points.
And respond to each other’s comments, so it doesn’t become an echo chamber.
Needs to be for detail and threads.
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Solution
Mandatory Staffing Ratios
Understanding healthcare facilities continues to be one of the most significant challenges in the delivery of quality health care services to patients. As a result of having a significant workload in healthcare facilities, healthcare providers, especially nurses, are more likely to commit errors that can threaten the safety of patients. Heavy workloads in healthcare facilities also make nurses to be more susceptible to burnout and also contribute to high turnover rates in healthcare facilities which further worsens the challenge of nursing shortages (Takahama, 2022).
I believe that the adoption of mandatory staffing ratios for healthcare facilities across different states in the US will play a significant role in reducing safety issues associated with nursing staff shortages and also increasing the quality of healthcare services. In states that have adopted mandatory staffing ratios in healthcare facilities such as California, there has been an evident increase in the quality of health care provided to patients and a decrease in incidences such as errors that can endanger the lives of patients.
The passing of mandatory staffing ratios requires consistent advocacy efforts from professional nursing organizations in the target states. Through professional nursing organizations such as the American Nurses Association, nurses can therefore organize coordinated advocacy efforts to enact mandatory staffing ratios across different states in the US (Vuong, 2020). Sustained advocacy for the enactment of laws allowing mandatory staffing ratios in healthcare facilities is important in that it will help not only improve the standard of care that patients receive but also prevent nurses from adverse health effects such as burnout.
The concerns of hospital associations related to mandatory staffing ratios are mainly profit-focused. Most hospitals are concerned about the higher costs that will be needed to hire more nurses if mandatory staffing ratios are adopted. Such concerns are, therefore, not valid (Vuong, 2020).
Adopting mandatory staffing ratios would help save more healthcare-associated costs due to the increased quality of services to patients while at the same time allowing healthcare facilities to attend to a large number of patients.
References
Takahama, E. (2022, January 13). WA hospital workers filed a record number of workplace safety complaints last year, unions say. The Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/wa-hospital-workers-filed-record-number-of-workplace-safety-complaints-last-year-unions-say/
Vuong, L. (2020). Staffing Ratios and Burnout. AJN, American Journal of Nursing, 120(5), 13. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.naj.0000662724.83879.81