Medical Staffing Management

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, with managed care systems, hospitals needed to compete for managed care contracts and gain clout with insurers for better reimbursement rates; therefore, administrators, who are usually not medically trained, save costs by downsizing the R.N. staff, resulting in less favorable patient outcomes. The author suggests that the simplest solution would be to abolish for-profit medical facilities and replace them with facilities judged on how well they spend all their income on patient care by providing the best possible medical care by doctors, nurses and nursing assistants. The paper concludes that, as long as the United States considers the right to make a handsome profit more important than the mandate to provide care for the sick, nothing will change.

Table of Contents
History of Nursing-Staff Erosion
Legal Ramifications
Possible Solutions
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Hospitals may cross-train janitors and security guards to do nursing work. "Studies report that hospital nursing staffs, which once consisted of 85-95 percent registered nurses and only 5-15 percent aides, are now only 80, 70 sometimes 50 percent registered nurses and up to 50 percent aides." This sort of understaffing leads to errors. Sometimes those errors are R.N. errors, due to lack of time to consider all the ramifications of their own and their assistants' actions. For example, in one nursing care facility, an elderly man, called Mr. D by authors Baker and Cooper, was restrained, partially because of his behavior. However, he became agitated during a time when he was not under observation because, with too few assistants, an R.N. had to reassign some staff."

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• Analytical Essay # 115985 : "Sanford USD Medical Center"
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• Persuasive Essay # 102768 : "Risk Management and the Nursing Shortage"

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