Staffing Issues Interactive Case Study

After you view the case study, reflect upon what you have learned and how it is related to the learning materials. Compare the case study to your nursing practice and give a similar example from your experience in which you might have run into an ethical situation.

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Nursing shortage places the healthcare system in an ethical dilemma. With many healthcare organizations experiencing acute shortages of nurses, their managements resort to other measures to mitigate against this shortage. Such measures include mandatory overtime and extended work shifts. Unfortunately, over-reliance on these measures has an impact on both nurses and patients. Nursing shortages have been linked to medical errors, higher morbidity, and mortality rates. Studies reveal that in hospitals with high patient-to-nurse ratios, nurses experience burnout and dissatisfaction, and this results in poor patient outcomes. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that to avert further shortage of nurses, there is a need for eleven million more nurses (Juraschek et al., 2019).
The case study under review exemplifies how grave the nursing shortage is to the healthcare sector. One of the adverse effects of the nursing shortage is the tendency of nurses to be forced to work mandatory overtime to attend to patients. This is often linked to increased medical errors such as administration of wrong medication, the prevalence of nosocomial infections, and high patient falls. From the case study, Grace,..