Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

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. Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

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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.  Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. 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. Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor. Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs. The Assignment (4-5 pages):Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. 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.Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

Nursing

Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.

The identified stressor is nursing shortage. The combinations of improved quality of life and advancements in medical sciences have caused community members to live longer on average. This trend is especially evidence among older adults (geriatric age group) with the numbers only expected to rise (Marc et al., 2019). It is important to note that living longer does not necessarily imply that individuals are living healthier lives as more people suffer from chronic ailments (such as diabetes, allergies, high cholesterol, hypertension and so on) thereby leading to a greater need for medical and nursing care (Spurlock, 2020). In fact, nursing shortage results in the lack of adequate numbers of nursing personnel with impacts on the patients’ wellbeing to include overcrowded emergency departments, more medication errors, and higher patient mortality (Rosenberg, 2019).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

It is evident that nursing shortage is a health care stressor as it impacts care outcomes and wellbeing of stakeholders. Still, there are two significant competing needs that hinder efforts to address nursing shortage. The first competing need is investment in information technologies (IT) targeted at addressing health care disparities. Health IT is considered as a good investment that can reduce the probability of errors and redundant procedures, improve guideline and protocol compliance, and foster better coordinated care thereby encouragement more equitable care delivery (Lee, 2015).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. Health IT presents tools such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and electronic health records (EHR) have been shown as vital for initiating and carrying forward reforms targeted at improving health car access, improving the quality and efficiency of care, reducing medical errors, and improving care delivery systems. Besides that, the role of health IT in preventing medical mistakes and reducing health care costs has been recognizing so that medical organizations are increasingly investing in health IT as a critical tool for supporting medical personnel. Overall, investment in health IT is considered as a means of improving the quality and efficiency of health care and containing costs thereby competing with the need to employ more medical personnel (Lee, 2015). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

The second competing need is efforts to improving financial returns while curbing costs/spending since medical organizations must be financially viable to continue operating even as they professionally and expertly attend to the care needs of their patients. Rising health care costs is a significant concern, especially in the face of increasing numbers of populations unable to pay for health care.  Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.The reality is that medical organizations are essentially business entities and make financial sense in order to continue operating. This is irrespective of whether the organization is a for profit or not for profit business entity. For profit organizations seeks to make financial returns to the investors while not for profit organizations seeks to continue operating by at least breaking even. It is for this reason that management in medical organizations are making significant efforts to curb expenditure by applying economic principles such as pay for performance incentives, lean management, bundling and capping payments, limiting services, and fundholding. Curbing spending implies that less funds would be spent on increasing staffing since this is a significant cost (Sturmberg & Bircher, 2019). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.

The organization has adopted an acuity-based nurse staffing model. In this case, staffing based on expected/anticipated patient acuity intended to optimize the use of the available nursing staff so that there are no wastages. The organization recognizes that nursing are needs are very dynamic and subject to a myriad of unit level and patient conditions that could significantly vary form one moment to the next moment. Given this awareness, the organization’s staffing policies considers the acuity of each patient and overall acuity mix in the departments and units before determining the number of nursing staff and their skills mix for each department/unit (Welton, 2017).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.  For instance, the emergency and acute care departments have higher nurse-to-patient ratios since patients who are newly admitted into the facility require more medical care and are at higher risk of experiencing clinical instability in the first few hours of them being admitted, and could even require more frequent care coordination, treatment and assessment. In addition, the policy recognizes that providing too much nursing care could result in higher staffing costs for the organization while too little nursing care as a result of nursing shortage could result in poor clinical outcomes. To ensure that the nurse staff allocations are not too much or too little, the organization frequently measures patient acuity to ensure that it keeps up with the real-time needs of nursing care delivery. The measurements are applied in predictive models and used to predict staffing needs for every department based on anticipated patient acuity (Welton, 2017). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.

As has been established, the organization applies a nurse staffing model that is based on anticipated patient acuity. This policy creates an ethical concern. The reality is that it does not affect the number of nurse staff available in the organization. Rather, the policy has an influence on the distribution of nurse personnel. Nurse personnel are still understaffed so that they have more to do, and this increases their stress levels and opportunities for errors so that patients are not assured of receiving the best possible care (Black, 2016).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.  Besides that, it increases stress levels among nurses so that even as they improve the health and wellness of patients, their health and wellness appears to be ignored. It is difficult for nurse staff to promote the health of their patients when they (nurses) are constantly challenge to promote their own wellbeing and health. It is unethical for the overworked nurses to be expected to provider quality care to patients and yet they are overworked and exhausted. While it is not unusual for nurses to be stressed even in well-staffed organizations since the nature of nursing care occasionally presents high-stress situations, still the current situation presents a concern as it exceeds the normally accepted stress levels by introducing staffing concerns. Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.In fact, the real ethical concern is that these overworked nurses are busy dealing with the work demands that they end up ignoring the burnout there are experiencing. Additionally, the nurse staff administrators and organization management have limited resources with which to address these ethical concerns so that they are either slow to address the concerns or end up ignoring them altogether even if aware that they exist. The medical organization has an obligation to adopt a proactive approach to address the nurse staffing problem without compromising patient safety and this includes ensuring that nurses are not overworked so that they experience burnout that compromises their ability to provide patient care (Masters, 2015). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.

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.

There is a need to implement creative solutions that would balancing the competing needs while addressing the ethical shortcomings of the existing staffing policy. The first solution is incentivizing nurses to take on extra shifts and pick up bad shifts by increasing bonuses and earnings. This is important for reducing burnout among nurses and helping them in feeling that they are not overworked since it galvanizes nurses to take on the unpopular shifts while remaining happy (Masters, 2015). The second solution is investing in professional development and long-term training for nurses to enable them adopt innovative care approaches that reduce the low staffing pressures. Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.The third solution is offering altered schedules to accommodate the professional and personal needs of nurses. Achieving and maintaining a profession and personal life balance for understaffed nurses is difficult, and the organization can help them to achieve this balance by offering altered schedules that enable the nurses to better accommodate both their professional and personal needs.Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges. For instance, nurses who are mothers with toddlers can be offered ‘mother friendly’ shifts to enable them spend more time with their children. Greater flexibility in shift start times and shift lengths can give the nurses some flexibility in choosing options that best meet their personal obligations that ensuring that they are happier with their work-life balance while promoting wellness and satisfaction (Black, 2016).Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges.