To Prepare:

• Review the Resources and think about the national healthcare issue/stressor you 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.

HEALTHCARE ISSUES 1

2

HEALTHCARE ISSUES

Shortage of Healthcare Providers

Name

Institution

Shortage of Healthcare Providers

The shortage of healthcare providers in this case nurses and doctors is a healthcare issue that is faced in my organization. With fewer healthcare providers, quality service cannot be attained. Successful public health outcomes are hugely contingent on the effective functioning of the healthcare workforce. Healthcare provider shortage and their dissatisfaction with their work environments are on the rise. Patient safety issues and adverse health outcomes result, including patient deaths, and increased stress, both physical and psychological, burnout, and frustration among health professionals are issues that come as a result of healthcare provider shortage. The culminating effect of nursing shortage and nurse burnout has been demonstrated as adverse effects on the quality and cost of patient care. Disturbingly, nurse shortage has also been correlated with increasing rates of patient mortality (McKenzie, 2016).

Besides, a shortage of healthcare providers affects the way patients are cared for. For example, emergency room work is difficult and not many nurses and doctors volunteer to work in them. As a result, many emergency rooms lack adequate doctors and nurses and this leads to poor emergency care to patients. This has become a wide-spread issue, the nursing shortage has been explored for its effects on a wide variety of patient outcomes. Lower number of nursing hours supplied to patients was associated with a variety of patient outcomes in hospitals (McKenzie, 2016). In addition to this, places like rural areas suffer the most with the issue of healthcare providers being inadequate. Rural areas lack convenient access to hospitals, healthcare providers and emergency services and this contributes to various health problems in rural areas.

In other organizations, the issue of shortage of healthcare providers is being addressed by hiring and training more healthcare workers and providing an environment that empowers and motivates them as this is necessary to rejuvenate and sustain the healthcare workforce, taking into consideration that high volume of nurses and doctors will lead to less burnout hence and also less strong desire to quit. This way, these organizations have ensured that emergency rooms have enough staff to care for patients and this has immensely improved quality care for them. Also, there has been increased one-on-one contact between patients and health professionals in general. Many organizations have endorsed and sought after the Magnet Certification as a way to provide superior nursing processes and high level of safety, quality and patient satisfaction (Haddad, Annamaraju & Toney-Butler, 2020).

Another way this issue is being addressed in other organizations is by adopting information technology as this helps in better service provision and less workload on healthcare providers. Improvement of information technology infrastructure has helped other organizations improve greatly in enhancing the health care system. For example, making real-time data available, increasing communication among providers and with patients through such approaches as remote medical consultations, collecting clinical information and evidence into accessible information databases, facilitating patient access to reliable health information, and reducing medical errors. This has improved quality service provision to patients.

Lastly, these organizations have assimilated to modern medicine and this has enabled advanced clinical knowledge and technology. It has helped health professionals when it comes to diagnosing, evaluating new tests and procedures and developing clinical practice guidelines by not requiring them to depend on their training to carry them out. Instead, they use science for example, they apply genomics to diagnose and eventually treat disease and engineering discoveries such as robotics and advanced epidemiological knowledge when it relates to large populations and databases. As a result, healthcare providers are able to provide effective healthcare to patients because they are not straining which could lead to stress while doing their work and it has also helped with healthcare worker shortage by replacing work that healthcare providers do with technology.

The strategies used to address organizational issues on national healthcare issues include the use of technology, workforce improvement through hiring and training of more healthcare professionals, improving their working conditions by reducing heavy workloads, less overtime, sufficient support staff and providing adequate wages. More application of science is another strategy that has been used in organizations to address healthcare issues. There are pros and cons to these strategies in my organization. Starting with the advantages, the rate of job abandonment due to heavy workload will reduce because of technology. As a result, healthcare professionals will be willing to stay in their jobs. The rate of job abandonment, the unwillingness of nurses to stay in their job, and comparing nursing with other occupations are highly important, such that the rate of job abandonment among nurses is 20% in the United States and it is estimated to reach 36% by 2020 (Shamsi & Peyravi, 2020).

Another advantage is, by hiring and training more workforce, it will lead to patients having efficient and effective healthcare in my organization. The healthcare providers in my organization will not experience burnout and stress which happens as a result of a shortage in the workforce. There will also be efficient managerial support which will enable job satisfaction and prevent employees’ dissatisfaction. This factor is one of the important causes of the shortage of nurses in the world with almost the same significance (Shamsi & Peyravi, 2020). On the negative impacts, some of the healthcare providers in my organization will lose jobs because of the growing technology and science in the sense that they will not be able to cope due to age.

References

Haddad, L. M., Annamaraju, P., & Toney-Butler, T. J. (2020). Nursing shortage. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.

McKechnie, T. (2016). Call for nurses: The multi-dimensional manifestation of nursing shortage on patient care. QIHI Journal of Healthcare Improvement and Patient Safety, (2).

Shamsi, A., & Peyravi, H. (2020). Nursing shortage, a different challenge in Iran: A systematic review. Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 34, 8.