Discussion 5: Healthcare workforce shortage

Click here to read the healthcare workforce shortage and its implications on America’s hospitals, at the American Hospitals Association’s (AHA) website.

Select a hospital, which is not more than two hours away from your place of residence. Based on your readings and understanding, create a 3- to 4-page report in a Microsoft Word document, that includes:

A plan for a rural, medium-sized hospital to deal with short- and long-term workforce shortages.

Your plan should include the following elements:

An introduction.

A description of the healthcare workforce shortage and its implications.

The aspects that need immediate attention and aspects that need long term attention. Provide a rationale on why these aspects need attention.

A description of the financial implications for these issues.

An explanation of the risks associated with these problems.

Your recommendations to solve these problems.

An explanation of the methods to measure the success of the plan.

A description of the next steps, if the plan failed.

A conclusion and a reference list.

Support your responses with examples.

Cite any sources in APA format.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.