Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly.

Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice.

Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization.

To Prepare:

• Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected.
• Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs.

The Assignment (1-2 pages):

Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Add a section to the 2-3 page paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following in 1-2 pages:

• Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
• 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.
• Due to the nature of this assignment, your instructor may require more than 7 days to provide you with quality feedback.

Expert Answer and Explanation

Analysis of the Nursing Shortage and Its Impact on Healthcare Organizations

The national healthcare issue of the nursing shortage has turned out to be a hard nut to crack in the healthcare fraternity. This shortage has ripple effects on health organizations through the following consequences: increased staff workloads, compromised patients, and financial burdens. The demand for nurses has remained high, and this is expected to increase in the coming years because of issues such as aging populations and high turnover rates.

This paper aims to discuss the nursing shortage, the effects it has on organizations, and measures that other organizations are taking to mitigate the problem. The results will also be applied to make recommendations on reducing the impact of this shortage in our organization.

The Nursing Shortage and Its Impact on the Organization

The shortage of nurses is a major concern in the nation’s healthcare system since it impacts most of the hospitals and healthcare centers in the United States of America. The American Nurses Association (ANA), in its 2023 report, reveals a shortage of RNs, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that over 200,000 new nurses will be required annually to fill the positions. In particular, this shortage has resulted in several problems in our organization. For instance, nursing positions have been open, causing increased pressure on those employed. Thus, they suffer from fatigue and are likely to make mistakes.

Patient satisfaction scores have decreased because people are waiting longer to see the doctor and not receiving the attention they deserve. In the financial aspect, the organization has had to hire employees from temporary staffing agencies, which has proved very costly to the firm’s budget. Based on the organizational data, we have found that the turnover rate of the nursing staff is higher than the national average of 16%. This high rate of turnover has aggravated recruitment and retention problems.

Summary of Articles on the Nursing Shortage and How to Adrress It

The nursing shortage is now a world concern and has been felt in almost all healthcare fields, including oncology. Tamata et al. (2023) synthesized current literature to determine factors contributing to the shortage, including policy and planning failures, inadequate capacity in nursing education, high turnover rate, and burnout. It is important to note that solving these problems requires more effort and multi-faceted interventions, including increasing the number of nursing schools, offering incentives, and enacting policies to address workload and stress. These solutions are intended to address the nursing shortage issue while providing the best care to patients.

In the same manner, Challinor et al. (2020) focused on the workforce in oncology nursing. They point out that the increasing incidence of cancer also enhances the need for oncology nurses while the stock of specialized nurses is declining. The authors provide strategies like increasing global cooperation for developing oncology nursing curricula, increasing access to continuing education in oncology nursing, and sharing tasks with other healthcare professionals. These steps are taken to enhance the workforce and help the patient.

Each article emphasizes that an effective approach to addressing the nursing shortage requires interventions at organizational and policy levels. While Tamata et al. investigate more general systemic concerns, Challinor et al. zoom into oncology nursing, calling for international cooperation and creativity in addressing workforce challenges.

Potential Impact on Our Organization

The measures to tackle the nursing shortage could have the following implications for our organization: Such strategies as nurse residency programs could result in lower turnover rates and increased levels of confidence among the workforce. However, initial investment in training and mentoring is required, which can be burdensome to the company’s cash flow. Likewise, using technology to streamline the workflow will increase effectiveness and decrease staff stress, but the use may take time to be accepted by staff due to the change in workflow; hence, the change of new technologies may initially have low acceptance rates among the staff.

On the positive side, promoting a supportive organizational culture and increased satisfaction at work could enhance nurse retention, reduce absenteeism, and ultimately produce improved patient care. That said, if not well executed, these strategies could lead to burnout of the leadership and management teams who are expected to spearhead these changes and handle the day-to-day challenges occasioned by the shortage of nurses.

Section 2

Competing Needs Impacting the Nursing Shortage

The shortage of nurses affects the quality of care because there are not enough nurses to care for patients. Due to the nurse shortage, patients in acute care settings receive delayed, less attention from providers, and fragmented care (Tamata et al., 2023). Healthcare organizations find it challenging to offer high-quality care and meet the set standards without compromising their current human resources, which leads to poor care delivery outcomes.

The second competing need is the wellbeing of nurses. Lack of human resources affects nurses’ physical and mental status, resulting in burnout, stress, and fatigue. Moral distress, along with high turnover rates emanating from high workloads, gives rise to the worsening of the shortage. Still, patient-centeredness is not the only thing that must be considered to support a healthy workforce of nurses. The ethical issue that occurs due to this is that staff are brought to the stress edge to meet organizational demands at the expense of health (Turale & Nantsupawat, 2021).

Organizations must ensure that workplaces and support systems are safe for employees to prevent burnout while offering the best care. Nurse retention and avoiding further loss of the workforce are other reasons why it is important to address nurse wellbeing.

Relevant Policy Influencing the Nursing Shortage

Our organization deals with staffing shortages by having a policy that forces employees to work extra hours. Nurses must work more than 12 hours to meet patients’ basic needs. It also provides for staffing deficiencies to be covered and maintains care constancy during extreme scarcities. However, it creates ethical issues regarding nurses’ autonomy and satisfaction levels. Fatigued shifts lead to mistakes, burnout, and compromise patient safety, and long shifts are also dangerous. While the policy can be beneficial for the short term, it could be more sustainable and, in fact, drives turnover. In this case, staffing cannot be achieved without considering the nurses’ health and the organizational outcomes.

Ethical Critique of the Policy

The mandatory overtime policy has some advantages and some ethical issues.

Strengths: It is effective in maintaining patient care during staff shortages and minimizing interruptions to health services (Ingstad & Haugan, 2024). The policy offers an instant fix to staffing shortages, thereby ensuring that organizations remain functional and patients receive optimal care.

Challenges: In an ethical context, the policy violates the nurses’ right to workload and excessive physical and emotional demands. Fatigue-induced mistakes compromise patient integrity and safety while pursuing organizational objectives; this is an ethical paradox between the needs of the organization, the patient, and the nurse (Ingstad & Haugan, 2024). Such dynamics have prompted the need for sustainable interventions that will address the immediate need for coverage and the future welfare of the workforce.

Recommended Policy Changes

Flexible staffing models and incentives can help manage competing needs and reduce ethical issues. Using internal float pools and per diem staffing, the nurses can work reasonable shifts while providing adequate staffing (Duru & Hammoud, 2022). For instance, the idea of nursing cross-skill across departments can solve the issues of staffing shortages without embracing mandatory extra working hours. Also, incentives such as retention bonuses, tuition support, and wellness programs help enhance staff satisfaction levels and retention (Duru & Hammoud, 2022). These changes effectively address patient care needs and nurses’ morale, create an ethical work climate, and decrease turnover while enhancing the quality of care.

Conclusion

The nursing shortage issues are complex and affect healthcare organizations, patients, and employees. It overloads the nurses with additional working hours, decreases patient satisfaction, and creates extra expenses due to costly staffing arrangements. Solving this problem is possible only with the help of short-term interventions, including contingent staffing, and long-term solutions, including proposals to expand the production of nurses with higher education and to provide retention bonuses.

Also, a supportive organizational culture and promoting the use of technology make the workforce happy and enhance operations. It is, therefore, important for healthcare organizations to embrace sustainable and ethical policies that will assist in averting the impacts brought about by this shortage of patients and nurses.

References

American Nurses Association. (2023). Nursing shortage statistics. https://www.nursingworld.org

Challinor, J. M., Alqudimat, M. R., Teixeira, T. O., & Oldenmenger, W. H. (2020). Oncology nursing workforce: Challenges, solutions, and future strategies. The Lancet Oncology, 21(12), e564-e574. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(20)30505-8

Duru, D. C., & Hammoud, M. S. (2022). Identifying effective retention strategies for front-line nurses. Nursing Management, 29(1). Https://Doi.Org/10.7748/Nm.2021.E1971

Ingstad, K., & Haugan, G. (2024). Balancing act: Exploring work-life balance among nursing home staff working long shifts. BMC Nursing, 23(1), 499. Https://Doi.Org/10.1186/S12912-024-02165-8

Tamata, A. T., & Mohammadnezhad, M. (2023). A systematic review study on the factors affecting shortage of nursing workforce in the hospitals. Nursing Open, 10(3), 1247-1257. Https://Doi.Org/10.1002/Nop2.1434

Turale, S., & Nantsupawat, A. (2021). Clinician mental health, nursing shortages and the COVID-19 pandemic: Crises within crises. International Nursing Review, 68(1), 12–14. Https://Doi.Org/10.1111/Inr.12674

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