Paper on Healthcare Staffing: Optimizing Patient Ratios for Better Outcomes

Introduction

The issue of healthcare staffing has been an area of concern, whereby the staffing of a healthcare facility determines the outcomes of health interventions. The staffing of a facility provides the personnel in the facility with the ability to be divided among the patients who need services. The number of patients that one is in charge of will be termed as the patient ratios of the facility (Forrester, 2016). The patient plans describe how the patients can be treated using the charted ways by the healthcare professionals, in the process giving the outcomes depending on the facility's staffing. The facilities which are staffed adequately experience better results compared to those where they are understaffed since the higher patient ratios mean that the patients will not be taken care of as needed due to the need of the staff to take care of many people at the same time, leading to the reduction of efficiency in the personnel.

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Understaffing in Healthcare Facilities and its Implications

The staffing of a health facility determines the outcomes of the treatment interventions undertaken in a facility. When the facilities are understaffed, the personnel have to work on many patients, which may result in their effectiveness in the duties that they are given to be reduced significantly. When the staffs in a facility are not as many as needed, they will have to work long shifts, which reduces their effectiveness due to fatigue. Fatigue reduces the staff's efficiency since they will have reduced alertness and precision, which is needed in the healthcare profession, leading to the increased possibility of mistakes, which may prove fatal to the patients (Mittal & Singh, 2016). The understaffing of facilities will also increase the possibility of the much-needed psychosocial support not being provided to the patients, increasing the patients' recovery period. The understaffing in the hospitals will also result in the reduced possibility of retaining the already recruited personnel and increasing the possibility of recruiting new personnel.

Proposal for Improvement

There is a need to reduce the effects of understaffing as experienced in the healthcare industry. Therefore, there is need for the personnel in charge of staffing to look into the situations and find workable solutions which will help in the process of improving the possibilities of achieving patient safety and the possibility of overcoming the health challenges that they may face in the process of providing interventions for the challenges that the patients experience (Thériault et al., 2019). The management of the healthcare facilities needs to find the solutions to the problems they face through looking for the most overwhelmed departments and the effects of the understaffing that they experience. When this is done, there will be an increased possibility of achieving the goals, missions, and visions set by the different organizations which have been experiencing understaffing. Through proper evaluation, the facilities will be able to use the limited budgets at their disposal to look for workable solutions to the problems that they face in terms of being understaffed.

Recommendations

The upper management and essential stakeholders in the organization should be made aware of the issue that the organization faces so that they can work on getting workable solutions to the problems that they face. There should be effective communication set up in the organization to ensure that the staff in the organization knows that the senior management is aware of the issues that they face, and is working towards the achievement of a condition whereby they will be able to overcome the understaffing challenge that they face (Alkhateeb et al., 2019). Additionally, the staff should be sufficiently compensated for the extra shifts that they take to ensure that they are motivated towards working despite the working conditions being difficult. Additionally, the organization should look into ways to solve the staffing issue by hiring extra staff to help in the areas where the organization is overwhelmed. This way, the organization will manage to reduce the strain in the organization's areas where there are issues with understaffing.

Risks of Implementation

The significant risk associated with solving the problem is the possibility of worsening the organization's financial situation. When the organization looks for ways to solve the understaffing by recruiting the staff needed, they have to ensure that they review the finances needed. As long as the organization does not suffer from severe understaffing, the organization has to look for alternatives to hiring, since they will need to ensure that they have enough to pay the increased workforce without fail, which may lead to the organization having to overlook some of the essential issues while opting for staffing (Pattanayak & Haines, 2017). The process of hiring new staff may be met by resistance by the staff in place, especially if they are not taken care of by the organization. They will feel that they have been overlooked and therefore feel the need to resist the recruitment process, with a possibility of a go-slow or strike to show their resistance to the activities being practiced.

Benefits of Implementation

Through staffing, the organization will be able to achieve the possibility of achieving the best outcomes in their disease intervention process. The organizations in question need to look for ways to solve the issues presented to them by patients through the provision of the services that they can provide. Additionally, the staffing process provides the organization with the chance to benefit from the diverse experiences of the staff so that they can increase the possibility of achieving the goals that the organization has. Additionally, suppose the organization adds to its workforce. In that case, it will be able to reduce the workload on its employees so that the ratio of staff to patients will either be equal or almost at par with each other. This way, the nurses in the organization will have more time to take care of the patients under their care, hence having more time to get the best outcomes from the interventions put in place.

Evaluation Plan

The evaluation process is essential for any project undertaken since it helps in giving the people concerned a look into the projects that they have been undertaking and reviewing the project's effectiveness in addressing the issues that they sought to correct. Through evaluation, the processes undertaken are viewed from the angle of whether or not they have addressed the issues they were supposed to solve in the first place. Therefore, the evaluation process will help decide whether to keep up with the practice or to stop it with a preference of others, which seem to have been working or new ones. In the case of the issue of staffing in the organization, the best thing to do would be to evaluate the progress of the process after a few months to see whether or not the progress is worth keeping up with. This way, the decision arrived at will help in settling on the direction to take to give the organization the best outcomes in their endeavors.

References

Alkhateeb, A. F., AlAmri, J. M., & Hussain, M. A. (2019, January). Healthcare Facility Variables Important to Biomedical Staffing in Line with 2030 Saudi Vision. In 2019 Industrial & Systems Engineering Conference (ISEC) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Forrester, K. (2016). Nurse-to-patient and midwife-to-patient ratios. Journal of law and medicine, 23(4), 795-800.

Mittal, P., & Singh, V. (2016). Understaffed, Underserved: Human Problems of India's Public-Health System. IndiaSpend, September 7.

Pattanayak, S. K., & Haines, A. (2017). Implementation of policies to protect planetary health. The Lancet Planetary Health, 1(7), e255-e256.

Thériault, M., Dubois, C. A., Borgès da Silva, R., & Prud’homme, A. (2019). Nurse staffing models in acute care: A descriptive study. Nursing open, 6(3), 1218-1229.