The Nursing Work Environment

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the current nursing work environment faces a shortage of nurses and extended working hours for nurses, leading to fatigue and high turnover rates; while demand for nurses is increasing, the supply of nurses is not able to match the demand, which may lead to a 20% shortage of nurses in U.S. health care system by 2020. The author points out that hospitals with good working conditions provide clinical experiences to students so that changeover from academia to the work setting will be smoother; encourage differential nursing practice, based on level of education, job skills and pay scales and facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to foster team work and conflict resolution to ensure maximum patient care. This paper stresses that, because the primary role of health care organizations is to take care of patients without any errors, cost control measures should be used with extreme caution so that the quality of nursing does not suffer.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Issues
Changes Required
Recommendations
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Working for long hours on the part of the nurse's makes them fatigue since it decreases their energy and reduces their attention to the patient and thereby poses to be a serious danger to the patients. Most of the nurses work for 8-12 hours per shift and some work for more hours. Those concerned regulatory bodies of the state should disallow nursing staff from working longer than 12 hours per day and more than 60 hours every week. In addition to changes in staff levels and working hours, the plans of restructuring of the hospital which began in the mid-1980s brought about considerable changes in how nurses function. As a major step in humanizing nurses work atmosphere and bringing back trust, the report advises health care organizations to involve nurse leaders at all management levels and to seek input from nursing staff regarding decisions about work design and execution. Nurses are in major positions to help identify unproductive work processes that could lead to mistakes, recognize reasons of nursing staff turnover, and find out suitable staff levels for each unit."

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