Hospital Acquired Pneumonia Essay Paper
Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly.
Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice.
Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization.
To Prepare:
• Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected. NOTE: The healthcare issue/stressor is HOSPITAL ACQUIRED PNEUMONIA
• Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Hospital Acquired Pneumonia Essay Paper
• Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs.
The Assignment (4-pages):
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Add a section to the paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following:
• Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
• Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
• Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.
Hospital acquired pneumonia
Competition has typically been encouraged within the health care industry as a strategy for increasing value for all stakeholders. To be more precise, competition ensures the provision of better services and products that satisfy the needs of all stakeholders through improving processes and quality while reducing costs. For instance, capital limitations can restrict hospital control approaches such as having overcrowded wards. In the present case (addressing hospital acquired pneumonia), every resource is considered as scarce and subject to competing needs from other health care agendas. This makes efforts to prevent hospital acquired pneumonia in the midst of providing affordable and high-quality health care services an increasing challenge (Ruggiero, 2015). There is a conflict over whether to advocate for individual patients or equitable distribution of resources to larger populations. This conflict rests entirely on the role of social justice as it applies to the conflicting roles of non-maleficence (do no harm) and beneficence (do good) (Northouse, 2016). In addition, there are three resources of concern to the specific case owing to their scarcity. Firstly, the medical personnel who include nurses are limited in their capacities, skills, geography and time. Implementing strategies for preventing hospital acquired pneumonia are dependent on personnel awareness and their familiarity with the strategies. Having knowledgeable personnel is preferable since they are primed to understand and apply the prevention strategies. Secondly, facilities for delivering medical services are finite. It is not uncommon to have crowded facilities in the hospital. This situation is unlikely to change unless the facilities are expanded, a truly cost intensive endeavor. The facilities limitation can be addressed through making efficient use of the available resources so that high risk patients are isolated from the general populations. Thirdly, money for making changes to the facility is not unlimited. There are competing needs for money and there is a need to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to identify the agendas that have the least costs and most benefits (Joel, 2018).
References
Joel, L. (2018). Advanced practice nursing: essentials for role development (4th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Company.
Northouse, P. (2016). Leadership: theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Ruggiero, V. (2015). Thinking critically about ethical issues (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. Hospital Acquired Pneumonia Essay Paper