Nursing: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Essay

Nursing is a challenging profession where nurses take care of patients dealing with mental or physical illness. Nurses are the primary contact points for the patients since they are the ones who check patients' vital signs before giving them appointments to the physician or professional doctor. In this paper, the healthcare stressor would be discussed in detail so that its competing needs are determined, and a policy should be recommended to reduce the stressor. Moreover, the ethical considerations would also be debated for the policy application and its strengths and issues.

The two competing needs that impact nurse's burnout are increased demand for patient care and administrative procedures. The physical health problems in the form of anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc., adversely affect the nurse's health and cause burnout (Salyers et al., 2017). Nurses' functioning is negatively affected as they are forced to take frequent breaks due to tiredness, lethargy, staying absent from work, or exhibit signs of low commitment towards their job. These symptoms directly affect their performance, and patient satisfaction levels are low. These factors collectively become a source for national concern as it has become a national health stressor because nurses are an indispensable part of the healthcare workforce.

The relevant policy that can be developed for reducing healthcare stressor, which is nurse burnout, is adequate staffing. The patient-nurse ratio is a powerful strategy to reduce nurse burnout, as there is a reverse correlational relation between staff hiring and nurse burnout (Chen et al., 2019). Certain burnout constituents such as emotional fatigue, reification, and reduced personal achievement are the causes of nurses' less commitment towards the job. Emotional exhaustion was deducted to be contributing the most out of these components. The service quality becomes poor as satisfaction is regarded as a major benchmark for performance results. Customer retention can also be a part of policymaking since patients would return to the same clinic or hospital where they know they would be served with personalized care, and that is only possible if a dedicated healthcare workforce, prominently including the nurses, are active and determined towards their job. The policy should encompass the patient-nurse ratio adjustments in the form that there should be nurses who could attend to him within the day and night shifts for one patient. The increased number of patients would be attended by a sufficient number of nurses, conducive to maximized patient health outcomes. If there are fewer nurses and more patients, it can be dreadfully thought that the circumstances would be stressful for the nurse, resulting in errors, fatigue, absenteeism from work, etc.

The policy…

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…so that procedural fairness is maintained and the demands are met by optimizing the outcomes so that the goal of equal distribution of resources across all hospital departments should be achieved. The resources, workers, and patients' competing needs would be balanced and justified based on cost-effectiveness. Still, the distinction should be made if the restrictive allocation and rationing of nursing staff hurt patients' health outcomes. It would bring ethical considerations to healthcare hiring staff and their policies. There are recruitment pressures in staff shortages that have raised international eyebrows; however, it does not minimize the role of skilled nurses, even in staff shortages, so that they are fully attentive towards the patient's needs, no matter how much pressure this poses on them mentally and physically. The resources become scarce in such a situation where nurses are forced to meet the patient's expectations, even if they make errors in prescribing wrong suggestions or medications. Therefore, it puts the nurses under intensified stress to prioritize patients' needs even in times of scarcity.

Healthcare policymakers and staff hiring specialists should consider adequate staffing to reduce nurse burnout to observe less absenteeism or job quittance. Ethical concerns would be included in adequate staffing so that resource allocation of proficient, registered, and licensed nurses and proper rationing should amplify net economic benefit…