An institution needs to measure input and output to effectively staff the facility. Input can be measured by patient arrivals and appointment requests (request for care). Output can be measured by patients treated, cost per case, quality and access. The physician organization also assists in providing excellent care by recruiting and retaining physicians necessary to provide this care. Physician supply should remain open to leave and come as the community demand raises and lowers. However, it is more effective to be strategic in planning the staffing needs. Too big leaves physicians underworked. Too small leaves physicians overworked. A medical staff plan should…
In the article Medicare Under Observation, it is mentioned how unfair and ineffective the Affordable Care Act is for senior citizens in the United States. The article emphasizes on a letter written by a Medicare beneficiary who recently had gone to the emergency room to get treatment for a urinary tract infection and ended up having to stay for hours only to be told he was not going to be able to go home and he was being admitted into the hospital for observation which he claims that under the Affordable Care Act law Medicare will not pay anything on. This left him very puzzled and wondering how come he needed to stay over a period of two to three days. This being the case, he would have to be responsible for paying this medical bill in full…
Apart from staffing plan, there is also the staffing pattern. Kim, Harrington, & Greene (2009), refer to staffing pattern as the proper number of staff designated to each function or responsibility within a group for each shift and per day. Staffing patterns include using part time nursing staff, using staff that is hired temporarily, skill mix of nursing personnel, and tenure experience plus mix of nursing personnel. According to Wallace (2013), to have sufficient equipment, support personnel, and supplies are aspects that must be taken into consideration for any effective model for staffing so as to improve upon the work flow of nurses. Taking into consideration the size of the healthcare establishment, the aiding staff-nurse ratio, and the nursing care hours per patient day, I will utilize the management engineering pattern. This pattern will permit me to assign nurses based on a careful analysis of availability and patients’ needs and the 1:1 ratio for supportive nurses and nurses is quite appropriate for the management engineering model because clients with diverse magnitude of care will easily be provided a distinct or exclusive healthcare services. However, the number of patients in the hospital also influences how the management engineering model functions because an increase in the number of…
These shifts still need to be filled because of the ever increasing patient amount within the hospital. These extra hours will play a toll on our current employees who are expected to step up and take these extra shifts. “Long work hours can lead to fatigue, restlessness, inadequate sleep, pain and deficits in performance and reaction time as a result of increased exposure to physical demands and insufficient recovery time (Bae, Nursing Overtime: Why, How Much, and Under What Working Conditions?). Continuing, “Reduced rest and recovery time leads to physiologic depletion or exhaustion that continues into the next workday. The Institute of Medicine recommended nurses work no more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period and no more than 60 hours in a 7-day period to avoid error-producing fatigue” (Bae, Nursing Overtime: Why, How Much, and Under What Working Conditions?). Nurses will not be able to abide by this recommendation from the IOM due to the need for overtime of nurses on the ICU from missing three nursing positions. This will prove to be unsafe and unhealthy for the patients and the individual nurse working so many overtime hours alike. “Excessive use of overtime increases nurse injuries, including needle stick and musculoskeletal problems” (Bae, Nursing Overtime: Why, How Much, and Under What Working…
When making the schedule for a 30 bed unit with a temporary vacant nurse position, considering the use of per diem nurses, use of overtime for your current staff, or just working with the available staff needs to be decided by the nurse manager. The pros and cons of each option will be discussed.…
Efficiency in healthcare operations is becoming an increasingly important objective for many decision makers. Efficiency is simply the ratio of outputs to inputs, not the quality of outputs but the lowest possible cost of production. Adequate assessment of efficiency implies the availability of standards against which actual costs may be compared. In many health care organizations, these standards may be formally introduced into the budgetary process. Thus, a given nursing unit may have an efficiency standard of 4.3 nursing hours per patient day of care delivered. This standard may then be used as a benchmark by which to evaluate the relative efficiency of the unit. If actual employment were 6.0 nursing hours per patientka day, management would be likely to reassess staffing patterns.…
Thank you both for your comments. As you have both mentioned the Medicare rule for observation is very complex and confusing. The intention of the rule is to set clinical criteria for observation, and rapidly discharge the patient in twenty-four hours. However, this does not always happen. Some observation patients can stay up to ninety-six hours before being discharged or switched to observation status. One of the problems is individual health care organization interprets the Medicare rule differently. Then if the patient had a managed care Medicare carrier, the rules may be different. This makes observation status for an organization nightmare to manage (Hockenberry, Parlato, & Ross, 2014). What I find even worse, observation increases the…
Abstract— The paper examines working of outdoor patient departments in a general hospital. There are several out-patient departments and hundreds of patients visit the hospital daily for treatment. The main objective is to minimize the average waiting time of the patients. The current performance is determined and newer ways are identified to improve the performance of the hospital. Various alternatives are found and evaluated by simulating each of them. The objective of minimizing waiting time of the patients is achieved by altering the process by keeping the resource (staffs and doctors) constant which is against the conventional and commonly held view of shortage of staffs.…
Two major forms of staffing guidelines will be discussed, nurse-to-patient ratio and staffing by acuity. This paper will discuss the history of each staffing form. It will point out the benefits and negative features of both practices, describe how hospitals deal with staffing and discuss the states that have laws requiring certain guidelines be followed.…
The familiar phrase of overworked and under appreciated has rang through the nursing field. As health care reform and insurances make critical changes, nurses are forced to keep up. Nursing managers are in a bind to meet the new budget cuts and criteria set forth by these changes, which includes higher patient to nurse ratios. Low staffing can lead to nurse burnout, job dissatisfaction and poor staff retention (International Journal of Nursing Practice, 2014). This article will outline some issues at hand with unsafe staffing ratios and the legislative actions regarding this matter.…
Nursing shortage is a phenomenon that is affecting nurses and the provision of adequate patient care in today’s health care industry. Nursing shortage is said to occur when the demand for employment of nurses is far greater than the number of nurses willing to be employed at that time (Huber, 2010). According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (A.A.C.N.), “the nursing shortage is expected to increase as baby boomers age, and the need for health care increases” (A.A.C.N., 2013, Para 1).…
It is difficult some days to do sticky notes on every child because you have those days where if everything could go wrong it will. However, with observing the students throughout the day you will learn stuff about the students that you may not have noticed before. We are to have a minimum of 1 sticky note per child per day. If you can really sit back and observe, you will learn things that you may not find out from a student if asking them a question. For example, if you ask a student to count for you they may count well for you or decide that they don’t want to. However, if you observe them counting their blocks as they are playing in the block area you may find that they can count to 10 without any trouble. The stick notes also allow you…
Implementation of different types of operating theatre scheduling is based on the complexities of the real situation in the hospitals. There are several techniques that have been used by past researchers in order to achieve their objectives and reduce the constraints such as linear programming , heuristic…
Los Rayos del Sol Medical Center, has changed their staffing model but nevertheless, the shortage of nurses has continued to stagger. They have added two registered nurses along with a housekeeper who is making minimum wage to all units. In addition, they have also reduced the number of nurses from 12 patients per nurse…
Scheduling nurses for shifts can be one of the most tedious and time-consuming jobs a manager faces. Shifting through various absence requests, ensuring no one is working overtime, while at the same time making sure the schedule gives everyone an equal number of shifts, is no easy task.…