Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

Discussion: Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues Quite often, nurse leaders are faced with ethical dilemmas, such as those associated with choices between competing needs and limited resources. Resources are finite, and competition for those resources occurs daily in all organizations. For example, the use of 12-hour shifts has been a strategy to retain nurses. However, evidence suggests that as nurses work more hours in a shift, they commit more errors. How do effective leaders find a balance between the needs of the organization and the needs of ensuring quality, effective, and safe patient care? In this Discussion, you will reflect on a national healthcare issue and examine how competing needs may impact the development of polices to address that issue. Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

ORDER  HERE A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

To Prepare: Review the Resources and think about the national healthcare issue/stressor you (nursing shortage) previously selected for study in Module 1. Reflect on the competing needs in healthcare delivery as they pertain to the national healthcare issue/stressor you previously examined. By Day 3 of Week 3 Post an explanation of how competing needs, such as the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients, may impact the development of policy. Then, describe any specific competing needs that may impact the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected. What are the impacts, and how might policy address these competing needs? Be specific and provide examples.

Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues: Nursing Shortage

How competing needs may impact the development of a policy

The development of a policy in the healthcare sector can be influenced by some competing needs. For instance, the needs for the healthcare workforce, patients, and resources may affect the formulation of a policy since the agenda that is being advocated by the policy should align with competing needs.   For instance, the needs of the workforce and the patients can be addressed by a policy addressing the issue of adequate nurse staffing in a healthcare organization at a minimized financial cost.  The efficient provision of healthcare services in the terms of quality, quantity, and the cost is supported by the effective utilization of the workforce in a healthcare organization (Lopez et al (2015).Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.Failure to utilize the available workforce effectively might result in a shortage or oversupply of healthcare workers in an organization. For instance, a healthcare organization might experience economic inefficiencies and misallocation of resources due to the oversupply of the workforce. On the other hand, various shortcomings such as low quantity and quality of care occur due to the shortage of healthcare workers. Under such a circumstance, the resources required for the provision of essential services are limited. The limited resources increase nurses’ work overload resulting in burnout, which compromises patient safety (Lopez et al, 2015).Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

Specific competing needs that may impact nurse shortage

Nurse shortage as a national healthcare issue might be impacted by a good fit between an organization’s operating cost and patients’ needs in terms of quality and safe care. Consequently, healthcare organizations are exploring schemes for balancing between nurse staffing and patient needs. This move will enable them to maintain the sustainability of operating costs and provide quality and safe patient care (Van den Oetelaar et al, 2016). Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.Organizations should strive to match nursing capacity to the needs of patients optimally. This goal can be achieved through the fair distribution of nurses in various departments, thus distributing workload equally among practitioners (Van den Oetelaar et al, 2016). Therefore, the organizations must balance between patients’ needs and nursing staff. This balance can be achieved by managing the workload for nurse practitioners.Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.

The impacts and how policy might address the competing needs

Patient and staff needs are affected by workload. Additionally, the workload has an impact on an organization’s resources. Errors and poor patient outcomes in a healthcare organization are attributed to burnout. Also, nurse job dissatisfaction and burnout are caused by a high workload of the nurses. The use of temporary employees due to the high nursing staff turnover increases the operating costs (Van den Oetelaar et al, 2016).Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues. These competing needs might be addressed by a policy. Specifically, the policy will improve nurse staffing by ensuring that an organization has an optimal nurse to patient ratio. An appropriate nurse staffing ratio will, in turn, improve the outcomes of patient care in a healthcare organization. A particular nurse to patient ratio will be outlined by the policy depending on the department where the nurses provide services in a healthcare facility. Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues. For instance, nurse staffing ratios for surgical and medical units vary. One nurse can be assigned to 5 and 2 patients in the medical and surgical units, respectively. Therefore, a policy can improve the overall working condition for nurse practitioners and the safety and quality of patient care (Livanos, 2015).  On the other hand, organizations will not incur the costs of adhering to the ratios since the need for training temporary or new nurses will be reduced. Additionally, the turnover of the nursing staff will be minimized. Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues.