Nursing Shortages and High Nurse Turnover Are Essay

Nursing shortages and high nurse turnover are very common issues faced in the health care industry. This instability of workforce in the health care industry in many countries is raising questions about performance of the nurses and quality of the patient care.

Gray & Phillips (1996) pointed out that nursing turnover has a negative impact on the organization's ability to meet the needs of the patients and provide them quality care. Tai et al., (1998) also considered nursing shortage and turn over as an important factor responsible for the poor performance of the health care centers. This is due to the reason that the high turnover affects the morale and productivity of the nurses who are left behind to take care of the patients while the health care unit hires the new staff members (Sofer, 1995; Cavanagh and Coffin, 1992; Shields and Ward, 2001)

Aiken et al., (2001) pointed out that the common reasons behind the turnover of nurses in Canada, America, Germany and Scotland were problems in the work design and emotional exhaustion. Some of the other reasons include other career options for nurses, low wages, leaving the profession and older ages of nurses.

Nursing shortage and turnover is not only impacting the performance but also the profitability of the health care units. This is due to the fact that patients prefer to go to only those health care units that have a stable, well trained and active nursing staff who provides high quality care. Constant turnover of nurses at a healthcare unit distracts the attention of nurses, forces them to do extra work that causes frustration resulting the low quality care of patients. Therefore, losing a single nurse gives a financial cost of double' the nurse's annual salary. In addition to these, healthcare unit is affected in a variety of ways like low quality care, decrease in number of patients, increase in absenteeism, increase in accidents, increase in medical staff turnover, increase in temporary staff costs and contingent staff costs.

Role of Manager Nurse vs. Leader Nurse in a Health Care Unit

The terms nurse leader or nurse manager are used interchangeably but in actual there is significant difference between these two terms. A nurse leader can be an effective manager but it is not necessary that every nurse manager becomes a good nurse leader. The responsibility of the nurse manager is to fulfill the duties that are assigned to him or her and managing the nursing staff who reports to the manager. A nurse leader however, has a very different role as he has to inspire and motivate others to perform their duties keeping in mind the framework. Leaders can never be made; they are born and they possess the ability to motivate, inspire and drive other staff members to achieve the vision and mission of the health care unit.

A nurse leader should have effective communication and interpersonal skills. He should be the risk taker and should have ability to think beyond the issue, travel extra mile in order to achieve the desired results. He shouldn't compromise on the destiny which is to provide high quality patient care. He should collaborate with the management to design strategies that help achieving the health care unit nursing staff goals. A nurse leader is considered as a role model by all the nurse staff members, so he should take the excessive responsibility on his shoulders and serve as an example for the other nurse staff members and managers. The leadership approach in a health care unit can be formal as well as informal. An effective nurse leader should take the responsibility of streamlining the workforce and allocating the resources.

Methods for Reducing the Level and Cost of Nursing Turnover by Nurse Managers and…