Inadequate nurse staffing is a practice issue that could benefit from being addressed through the policy process. Nurse staffing is an issue of both personal and professional concern. Inappropriate nursing staffing levels threaten patient safety and compromise the quality of nursing care resulting in greater complexity of care (Griffiths et al., 2018). It also has a detrimental impact on nurses’ health and safety since it increases nurse work pressure, fatigue, and rate of injury and affects their ability to provide safe care. When there is inadequate staffing, nurses do not have adequate time to do everything needed for every patient. Consequently, a nurse’s moral obligations to patients are compromised due to work restraints and stress overload (Griffiths et al., 2018.
Various stakeholders are responsible for seeing that hospitals have adequate nurse-to-patient ratios to promote patient safety and quality of nursing care. The stakeholders that would support the issue include individual nurses, hospital administrators, nurse managers, government legislative bodies and regulators, professional nursing organizations, and nursing accrediting agencies (Han et al., 2021).
A nurse can advocate for this issue by proposing a policy that will help address inadequate staffing in their state and presenting the policy to a state legislator. The nurse should research the impact of inadequate staffing on patients, nurses, healthcare organizations, and the healthcare system (Chiu et al., 2021). The research findings should be presented to the legislator to convince them of the need to enact a policy that will address the situation. In addition, the nurse should present the potential impact of the proposed policy in addressing the current challenges (Chiu et al., 2021). When presenting the policy to the legislator, the nurse should also highlight potential barriers to implementing the policy and offer solutions to mitigate these barriers.
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References
Chiu, P., Cummings, G. G., Thorne, S., & Schick-Makaroff, K. (2021). Policy Advocacy and Nursing Organizations: A Scoping Review. Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 22(4), 276–296. https://doi.org/10.1177/15271544211050611
Griffiths, P., Recio-Saucedo, A., Dall’Ora, C., Briggs, J., Maruotti, A., Meredith, P., Smith, G. B., Ball, J., & Missed Care Study Group (2018). The association between nurse staffing and omissions in nursing care: A systematic review. Journal of advanced nursing, 74(7), 1474–1487. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13564
Han, X., Pittman, P., & Barnow, B. (2021). Alternative Approaches to Ensuring Adequate Nurse Staffing: The Effect of State Legislation on Hospital Nurse Staffing. Medical care, 59(Suppl 5), S463–S470. https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0000000000001614
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