Nurse Shortage/Staffing Issues: Workforce

Nurse Shortage/Staffing Issues Name Institution Nurse Shortage/Staffing Issues Nurses are important to the healthcare profession and without them; the quality of care would be compromised (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2018). The World Health Organization report puts the number of nurses and midwives across the world at 29 million. However, despite this seemingly large number, the nursing profession continues to face several staffing issues with an imbalanced nurse to patient ratio because the workforce is not equitably distributed, there is a high turnover of nurses, and limited number of educators (Sawaenqdee et al., 2016). The shortage of well trained nurses has presented a great challenge towards achieving “universal health coverage”. The problem has been talked about across the globe and yet nothing has changed. In fact, the situation has just gotten worse with the shortage of nurses expected to be 12.9 million from the current 7million by the year 2022 (“International Council of Nurses”, 2014). The failure to ensure the right balance between nurses and patients has led to burnout with the current nurses overworked and unable to deliver quality. Today, when one goes to health institutions especially the public ones, there would be long queues with one nurse expected to attend to large number of patients and they would often admit that they are burnout (Kaddourah et al., 2013). Go to any hospital today in the late hours and nurse burnout would be evident. In certain countries, nurses have to work for long and in certain circumstances they would be called in to assist in emergency situations at the time they are supposed to be resting after a long day at work because they are the only ones with the skills to assist in such a situation. Because of the shortage, nurses normally have to handle a lot of situation and the wonder is: “who is the best nurse for any given situation?” (Welton, 2016). What the current state of the practice expects is that a single nurse would be able to handle multiple problems to make up for the shortage. Walking this path is not aiding the carrier growth of the nurses and the improvement of health care. Nurse staffing issues have led to an aging workforce with most registered nurses today aged 50 years and over and they would soon be facing the retirement age (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2018). Nursing profession is currently facing serious staffing issues and shortages and even the nurse faculty in institutions have limited resources to train new nurses (Haddad & Toney-Butler, 2018). The most serious issue is that newly employed nurse graduates normally leave the profession after a short time due to burnout because the profession never meets what they expected (Coetzee et al., 2013). The staffing ratios are alarming and despite the knowledge about this, there have not been any efforts to implement minimum staffing ratios. There is no universally agreed upon minimum staffing ratio and this has perhaps been the majo...