Good Essay On Nurse Staffing And The Relationship To Job Satisfactory And Retention

Stimpfel, Sloane & Aiken (2012) discuss the apparent levels of job satisfaction for nurses in relation to low nurse staffing levels coupled with length of shifts in care facilities. Survey data from four states indicate that up to 80% of nurses felt comfortable with scheduling practices but as the length of shifts increased to beyond thirteen hours, patient satisfaction with care decreased significantly which could signal a case of nurse dissatisfaction due to decreased commitment to work. Similarly, for nurses working within shifts of beyond ten hours, they were more likely to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction by two or three times higher likelihood than nurses working for shorter shifts of less than ten hours. The effect of this would tend towards demeaning the well being of the nurses as well as resulting to high job turnover rates which are apparently expensive to handle in the health care sector.
On the other hand, patient safety is affected negatively and this paints the healthcare sector or the healthcare facility in bad light. The study suggest that policy makers in the healthcare sector need to place greater concern on regulating nurses’ work hours in a similar model as those of resident physicians. Nurse leaders on the other hand need to encourage and maintain workplace cultures that respect and accord nurses their rightful entitlement to vacation time, day-offs as well as allowing nurses to work without retribution on overtime.
The article opens up the effects of low staffing levels as which apparently force policy makers and nurse leaders to develop tight and long shift schedules for nurses. While these tight schedules and lengthy shifts may offer temporary solutions to the apparent shortages in healthcare facility, they pose a grave danger for the patients, the healthcare sector as well as the nurses’ wellbeing (McHugh et al., 2011). In exploring these issues, the article offers substantial background upon which the stakeholders in the healthcare sector can refocus their energy and resources to formulating strategies that offer permanent solution to nurse shortage menace. Such measures would include the increased recruitment rates and improving the working conditions for nurses as well as continued education opportunities for nurses. This would help avert the turnover rates that have become sticky issues for the healthcare sector both in loss of human labor and experience to other job sectors that offer better conditions for workers (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2012).

References

American Nurses Association [ANA]. (2012). Recruitment and retention of nurses. Retrieved from http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessional Nursing/workforce/Recruitment
McHugh, M. D., Kutney-Lee, A., Cimiotti, J. P., Sloane, D. M., & Aiken, L. H. (2011). Nurses’ widespread job dissatisfaction, burnout, and frustration with health benefits signal problems for patient care. Health Affairs, 30(2), 202-210.
Stimpfel, A. W., Sloane, D. M., & Aiken, L. H. (2012). The longer the shifts for hospital nurses, the higher the levels of burnout and patient dissatisfaction.Health Affairs, 31(11), 2501-2509.