Essay Sample on Nurse-Patient Ratio Policy

Nursing associations have always wanted to be assured of patient safety by having an accurate nurse-patient ratio. Conversely, most hospital executives do not wish to spend a lot of money on employing a good number of nurses to move toward success. Hospitals have been reluctant to address the issue, which instills fear in nurses due to the workload they are exposed to when dealing with patients. Since hospitals see this as an extra cost to take care of the data, they have ignored the motion.

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American Nurses Association has seemed to present a bill on the nurse-patient ratio and the associated safety of the patients in the hospital. The association seeks to employ more nurses, bearing in mind that the patient information comprises demographics, history of the disease, and the security membership numbers that need several departments to handle. Looking at the enormous healthcare breaches as of 2018 (Montgomery, 2019), it was necessary to make a move to ensure there are nurses who are responsible for handling information on a specific number of patients. However, government officials' assumption of the motion, in terms of expenses, seems to deem the hope of adopting a nurse-patient ratio policy (Qureshi et al., 2019). Also, there was a need to reduce the work overload on a single nurse and reduce the time that a single nurse worked.

Negative impacts overly on the patients as they might lose the care they need to a certain degree. The opposition groups are the financial departments from the hospital and government ministries in the health wing. Interest groups remain to be the associations that do not want to suffer public blame on losing patients as a result of lacking enough care from doctors.

Information strategies

One of the methods that have been used is the writing of memos to the concerned offices. They are written over and over again. In some other cases, nurses will push for involvement in the decision making groups (Montgomery, 2019). Through such moves, they will present grievances well and create a platform to convince the stakeholders. Sometimes it calls for aggressive options such as boycotting attending to work. This will portray the seriousness in their proposal for a better nurse-patient ratio.

In most cases, the nurse-patient ratio policy has failed to gunner enough votes to be passed as a bill. As a result, most of the patients have not accessed the care they need. Failing to pass the bill now will impose healthcare facilities on some challenges that are unprecedented in the future. For instance, there is an excellent probability of registering as many fatalities as possible. Passing the policy to become a health bill will save health facilities from the unseen problem.

References

Montgomery, S. (2019). The Effects of Nurse-to-Patient Ratios on Patient Outcomes in a Variety of Hospital Settings. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/670c/f7aee1f0a2363ba74158489f5ed03795d448.pdf

Qureshi, S. M., Purdy, N., Mohani, A., & Neumann, W. P. (2019). Predicting the effect of nurse–patient ratio on nurse workload and care quality using discrete event simulation. Journal of Nursing Management, 27(5), 971-980. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739381/