Current Issues In Nursing Practice

Since the nursing practice begun, there have been many issues affecting this practice some of the issues are negative while others are positive. Current issues provide opportunities for debates about matters affecting nurses currently. The current issues help in providing forums to examine the contradicting views on the demands and difficulties that the nursing field is facing which affect the delivery of healthcare. The debating of current critical issues encourages independent thinking whereby it helps one develop their opinion on these issues. In this paper, the mandatory overtime for nurses is discussed as a current issue that is debated upon.
In all hospitals, the field of nursing has always experienced shortages regarding nurse practitioners due to various reasons such as time off and leave of absence given to nurses, an increase of population in hospitals and vacant nursing posts. This problem is commonly solved by having the nurse practitioners work overtime which most of them are glad to do occasionally since it has extra pay. Due to this lack of enough nurse personnel, hospital administrators implement the mandatory overtime policy which endangers the quality of services offered by nurses and also threatens the security of
The use of this policy can help reduce patients’ harm, though working while exhausted generally increases the patients’ harm, voluntary working overtime makes the nurses more careful since it is out of self-will by gauging the level of their fatigue and determine whether they can deliver health care services properly during this overtime (Repique & Matthew 2015). Though some states have put laws in place to control mandatory overtime, breaking this cycle can be difficult since most hospitals are used to