Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Assignment
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Assignment
To Prepare:
• Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
(Nursing shortage)
The Assignment (4-5 pages):
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor. (Nursing shortage)
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• Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
• Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
• Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.
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A Sample Of This Assignment Written By One Of Our Top-rated Writers
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Concerning the Perennial Problem of Staff Shortage
All private healthcare settings, with the exception of federal and state taxpayer-funded public healthcare institutions, are businesses that must continue to operate. As a result, the financial issue of implementing various policies inside the company must be carefully managed in order to maintain the company’s sustainability. As a result, competing priorities are always present. For example, the corporation wants to make a profit, employees want fair pay and continued professional development or education, and patients want high-quality care that integrates the latest medical developments. In order to accomplish and balance all these competing needs, the organization requires resources and a strategic plan. But it is a management fact that resources are always finite. For this reason, there will always be areas of priority and areas that can be postpones for future consideration. This state of affairs creates a constant friction of stressors and it must be managed if the organization is to continue operating normally and affectively. The goal of this paper is to examine two competing needs in relation to the healthcare stressor of nurse shortage.
The Competing Needs Affecting Nurse Shortage
Nurse shortages are a recurrent issue in the United States, affecting practically all healthcare settings. Assisted living facilities are no exception in this regard. The ever-present challenge of shortage of nurses has a variety of causes. Inadequate salary, which leads to a high turnover rate, a lack of psychological safety at work, and a lack of opportunity for continuing professional progress are just a few of them (Cheng et al., 2016; Choi et al., 2016). In the case of the nursing shortage, one of the competing demands is for the organization to remain competitive while maintaining the quality of healthcare services provided. One way to stay profitable is to keep your team as small as feasible. This implies that at any particular time, only a small number of nurses will be on the organization’s employment.
Regrettably, this frequently leads to more serious issues for the company. Because there would be fewer nurses, the required nurse-to-patient ratios will not be met. Furthermore, the required and professional skill mix for a nurse on a given shift will not be satisfied (Twigg et al., 2019). There is only one result of this: the nurses at such a hospital will be overworked and eventually exhausted. One of the leading causes of job discontent and intention to leave is burnout. To put it another way, the nurse shortage will be worsened. Aside from earnings, another competing requirement in this scenario of nurse scarcity is for nurses to have a pleasant working environment with adequate psychological safety. Transformational leadership is widely acknowledged as the finest style of leadership in nursing and healthcare organizations in general. This is due to the fact that transformational nurse leaders motivate, empower, equip, listen to, and value their nursing staff (Northouse, 2019; Choi et al., 2016; Asiri et al., 2016). Nurses will be agitated, feel undesired and unloved, get irritable, and begin to make mistakes or commit errors if transformational leadership is lacking. As a result, care quality would suffer and patient safety will be jeopardized (Tawfik et al., 2019). As a result, staff turnover will be considerable, and many will quit, resulting in an even worsening shortage of nurses.
The Policy Affecting Nurse Shortage
Within the organization of concern here, there is an unspoken guideline that the business should have the smallest possible number of healthcare workers while getting the most performance out of them. Nurses are the single largest healthcare staff in any healthcare company by weight of numbers; hence this policy pertains to them specifically. Due to the high demands imposed on nurses as a result of this unpopular decision, there has been a regular stream of voluntary turnover from nurses. Work demands are too much to bear, and fatigue is a routine.
Psychological crises are common, and sadly no psychiatric services such as counseling are available to the healthcare staff. Shifts are lengthy, and nursing personnel are forced to work overtime, which affects their effectiveness even more owing to weariness. A healthcare employee who is tired and stressed out is many times more prone to committing errors at the workplace. For this reason, the matter of having few nurses overburdened with a lot of work is actually counterproductive to the organization itself. Such a policy of a lean workforce is therefore affecting the organization in a negative way.
The Hiring Policy: A Critique
The aforementioned organization’s hiring process is unethical, incompetent, and unsafe since it jeopardizes patient safety. Expecting three nurses to do the work that five nurses are expected to do is, first and foremost, ethically incorrect. This is owing to the fact that the activity puts them at risk of burnout, physical hurt (such as needle prick injuries) as a result of hurry, or inflicting physical harm to the patient as a result of human error such as presenting the wrong patient for surgeries. The consequences of such an approach are disastrous. Sentinel events or never occurrences are sure to happen, and they can result in the facility being penalized as well as the staff concerned losing their state practicing license. In addition, the staff will probably be sued for damages for negligence and professional malpractice.
The policy’s strength in encouraging ethics is that it allows the company to achieve a higher profit margin. As a result of this improved bottom line, the organization is able to continue to exist and aid the largest amount of people possible, as per utilitarianism’s ethical principle (Mandal et al., 2016). Its drawbacks include putting patient safety in peril and so violating the bioethical norm of nonmaleficence – or primum non nocere: do no harm – for the patient (Haswell, 2019). It also jeopardizes the nurses’ psychological well-being by causing stress, depression, and burnout.
A Different Policy Recommendation to Counter the Competing Needs and Requirements
Employment of enough nurses is one policy that, if executed by the organization in issue, will balance the competing needs of the nurses, the availability of resources, and the patients while being ethical at the same time. Following a policy of always keeping the appropriate number of nurses as staff and compensating them well can have numerous positive outcomes. For example, the organization will spend a lot of money in the short term, but the benefits may not be apparent right away. However, in the long run, the quality of healthcare will vastly increase, and the facility’s ratings will rise. This will bring in more patients by good word of mouth and the revenues of the facility will rise in the long run. With an increase in the revenue, the insufficiency of resources for hiring that was being experienced will give way to enough for hiring and retaining the best nursing talent. As a result, a scarcity of resources will become a profusion of resources. Nurses will be guaranteed jobs, and patients will be treated with beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice (Haswell, 2019).
Conclusion
Healthcare organizations, like all other businesses, have competing interests. Private healthcare facilities (like private assisted care facilities) are especially vulnerable. Private healthcare institutions make up the majority of the US healthcare system. As a result, most policies are usually at odds with the requirements of some stakeholders. The study uses nurse scarcity as an example of a healthcare stressor. As a result, it has been proved that, in order for the organization to remain solvent, the happiness of staff must also be considered, and adequate staffing levels must be obtained.
References
Asiri, S.A., Rohrer, W.W., Al-Surimi, K., Da’ar, O.O., & Ahmed, A. (2016). The association of leadership styles and empowerment with nurses’ organizational commitment in an acute health care setting: A cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing, 15(38), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-016-0161-7
Cheng, C., Bartram, T., Karimi, L., & Leggat, S. (2016). Transformational leadership and social identity as predictors of team climate, perceived quality of care, burnout and turnover intention among nurses. Personnel Review, 45(6), 1200–1216. https://doi.org,10.1108/pr-05-2015-0118
Choi, S.L., Goh, C.F., Adam, M.B.H., & Tan, O.K. (2016). Transformational leadership, empowerment, and job satisfaction: The mediating role of employee empowerment. Human Resources for Health, 14(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-016-0171-2
Haswell, N. (2019). The four ethical principles and their application in aesthetic practice. Journal of Aesthetic Nursing, 8(4), 177-179. https://doi.org/10.12968/joan.2019.8.4.177
Mandal, J., Ponnambath, D.K., & Parija, S.C. (2016). Utilitarian and deontological ethics in medicine. Tropical Parasitology, 6(1), 5-7. https://doi.org/10.4103/2229-5070.175024
Northouse, P.G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice. 8th ed. Sage Publications, Inc.
Tawfik, D.S., Scheid, A., Profit, J., Shanafelt, T., Trockel, M., Adair, K.C., Sexton, J.B., & Ioannidis, J.P.A. (2019). Evidence relating health care provider burnout and quality of care: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/m19-1152
Twigg, D.E., Kutzer, Y., Jacob, E., & Seaman, K. (2019). A quantitative systematic review of the association between nurse skill mix and nursing‐sensitive patient outcomes in the acute care setting. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 75(12), 3404-3423. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14194