Pediatric Nursing Shortage and Increased Retention

Pediatric Nursing Shortage and Increased Retention
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Institutional Affiliate

Pediatric Nursing Shortage and Increased Retention
Background
Nursing shortage makes for a major human resource challenge limiting the ability of healthcare systems to achieve the common objective of delivering safe and quality patient care across the equally diverse healthcare settings worldwide. The ensuing deficit of qualified nurses, the frontline caregivers in all healthcare systems, creates a wide range of negative implications on healthcare facilities or providers, nursing staff, and the diverse patient populations. For instance, the operational challenges of understaffed healthcare providers show strong correlations to high rates of nurse burnout and low job satisfaction leading to increased nurse turnover rates (Xu, 2020). Such adverse outcomes are further associated with increased operational costs through subsequent recruitment and training of newly hired nurses coupled with the retention of remaining nursing staff members. They also lead to poor or adverse patient outcomes that account for the increased cost of care and low patient referrals for the healthcare providers. Like many other healthcare sectors, the pediatric home health sector is not exempt from the human resource problem of nursing shortage. The children and family caregivers under pediatric home care suffer the outlined adverse implications of nursing shortage. In essence, nursing shortage is a major healthcare human resource problem yielding negative implications for all the stakeholders across the healthcare system. It is, therefore, important for nursing leaders and managers in all healthcare sectors, including pediatric home health, to develop and adopt effective interventional measures to increase nurse retention in addressing the healthcare human resource problem.
Clinical Problem Statement
            The human resource problem of nursing shortage limits the ability of pediatric home health to achieve the said outcome. Weaver (2018) states that children with medical complications account for approximately 25% of hospital days. Weaver (2018) further posits that children with medical complexities account for 40% of hospital charges, translating to one-third of children’s healthcare expenditure (Weaver, 2018). Prolonged hospitalization of children with complicated medical conditions accounts for 80% of the total healthcare expenditure on such patients (Weaver, 2018). Nursing shortage in pediatric home health is a major cause of prolonged hospitalization of children with such medical complications, necessitating the development and implementation of effective interventional measures. Besides increasing the cost of healthcare, the human resource problem in pediatric home health also negatively affects the quality of life for the children’s family caregivers. For instance, parents miss an average of 23 hours of employment to meet the care demands of their children due to nursing shortage in pediatric home health (Weaver, 2018). Nurse burnouts, poor working environments, and low job satisfaction among nurses are cited as some of the key contributors to ...