Paper on Navigating the Long-Term Nursing Care Crisis: Unraveling Challenges and Seeking Solutions

Long-Term Nursing Care Crisis

Long-term nursing care is the most crucial element in assisting aged persons, and younger persons with disabilities to maintain some level of quality of life. According to the United States recent Bureau of Labor Statistics BLD report, since 1998 nursing assistants held approximately 75,000 jobs in nursing homes, whereas home health and personal caregivers held nearly 746,000 positions (Osborne,2017). Despite the huge role they serve, most providers are comparatively underprivileged economically and have a low level of educational accomplishment

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What Is the Problem?

The adverse shortage of home health, home care aides, nursing assistants, and other professional providers is the chief trend shaping the current wave alarming about the long-term care staff. National data on turnover rates demonstrated wide discrepancy. For instance, turnover rates for the nursing home were 45%, and for home, health programs were 10% (Oliver, 2016). High rates of turnover have undesirable impacts on patients, providers, and, staff.

On top of that, the future accessibility of frontline providers' staff is not promising. Hanney and Karagic (2019) affirm that there will be an extraordinary upsurge in the size of the aged population as the “baby boom” generation ages.

Cause of the Problem

Low payment

Salary for paraprofessional workers is meager, considering the demand of responsibility they are expected to assume, most of the time in their line of duty they are required to endure heavy workloads and high injury rates. According to Scales (2020), nearly 30% of life at the poverty line. Furthermore, they are less likely to have health insurance than the average employee in the United States.

Another cause is community colleges, nursing schools, and technical schools fail to prepare RNs to conduct administrative duties-although that is the chief responsibility in long-term care nursing (Osborne, 2017). One way of intervening in the situation is through improving the living conditions of long-term care nurses through enhancing policies that affect them directly or indirectly.

The staffing crisis has grown and worsened over time, influenced by economic and social factors such as low payment and lack of inadequate training to offer quality care to consumers. Nonetheless, this crisis can be mitigated by changing public policies that affect long-term care nursing workers, education, and professional practices.

References

Hanney, N., & Karagic, H. (2019). Responding to the NHS and social care workforce crisis: the enhancement of opportunities through collaborative partnerships. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, 9(2), 175-188. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/24029/3/Karagic-RespondingNHSSocial%28AM%29.pdf

Oliver, D. (2016). David Oliver: Nurse staffing levels are still not safe. BMJ. 353. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i2665

Osborne, S. (2017). 2020 is too late to solve nurse-staffing crisis. Nursing Standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain): 1987), 32(2), 28-28. DOI: 10.7748/ns.32.2.28.s27

Scales, K. (2020). It's Time to Resolve the Direct Care Workforce Crisis in Long-Term Care. The Gerontologist. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnaa116