Nursing Shortage Research Paper

Staff Shortages in the Medical Profession

With the increase in demand for health care a critical nursing shortage is expected to rise over the years if necessary action is not in to effect. According to the bureau of labor statistics, the medical professional is expected to grow to 19% by 2022. While this is only a projected growth, many variable factors may affect the overall growth of the industry. Compared to an 11 percent projected growth for all occupations, the workforce is expected to grow if the government and private sector come up with strategies on how to meet the gap. According to the Vanderbilt University Medical Report released on February 2002, many Americans are concerned about the impact the shortage will have on the quality
Patients always want to be assured that there wants will be taken care of when they go to any facility to seek medical attention. While full recovery cannot always be assured, the staff plays a role in assuring and determining patient safety (CARE). The number of staff that is serving the people has an influence on the level of productivity and service. Whether it is nurses, housekeepers, cleaners, therapists or surgeons, productivity is dependent on the amount of workload one is assigned. In my personal experiments watching the nurse’s work in my finding I can say that the nurses work hours are long and over. Why? Nurses will have to give the night shift a full report, patients meds are due, document everything that went on all day during your shift. Nurses will always have overtime and the increased risk of making an error will prolonged if there’s know changes. The duration of the shift can only be limited to a number of hours due to the strenuous nature of the job. This also has an impact on the level of job satisfaction which entails more than just benefits and wages but is a wide concept that involves quality of work, facilities, the amount of overtime work on does, the level of interaction in the
It ensures flexibility in that one employee is trained to be able to perform multiple tasks that would have otherwise required other people to perform. Although the staff may take longer to perform the task and not with the same level of specialty as a trained employee, cross training breaks the monotony of work giving employees a sense of how practices work. In the department I’m working as now is trying to get everyone cross train. All nurses are responsible in leaning how a secretary daily assignments, learning how a PCA work also throughout the day. The reason why is because if a secretary calls out of work in there’s no one to replace that secretary is a good thing for the nurses to know how to discharge patients and knows how to assign new admission. That’s when some nurse can be very angry because now they have to do extra overload to accomplish their work throughout the day. It can be very frustrating for a nurse to deal with someone else job. Although this practice can be used as a method to address the shortages in staffing, as a long term strategy it is not advisable as one ends up with employees that know little of everything but not much of anything