Roles and Responsibilities Leadership in Nurse Turnover

Roles and Responsibilities in Leadership
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Roles and Responsibilities in Leadership: Nurse Turnover
Description and Impact on Quality of Care and Patient Safety
One of the biggest challenges the healthcare sector faces today is nurse turnover. Nurse turnover exacerbates the nursing shortage issue that continues to plague the world and heavily impacts patient outcomes all over the world. In the U.S., nurse turnover continues to greatly hamper or affect the ability of healthcare organizations to offer sufficient aptly and quality care to patients. Shaffer and Curtin (2020) note that the cost of nurse turnover for hospitals every year is between $4.4 million to $6.9 million. Aside from this, the researchers also indicated that it takes 85 days to fill up a vacated nursing position. What is more, the cost of replacing an individual nurse amounts to $82,000, which tells the sad but incredibly dire situation of the healthcare sector (Shaffer & Curtin, 2020). Such numbers mainly put a great strain on the healthcare sector and directly impact patients’ quality of care and safety.
The impact of nurse turnover rates on quality of care and patient safety is quite direct and evident. A reduced nursing workforce invokes a strain in the provision of care. The remaining nurses will have to deal with the same number of patients and offer the same care and attention while understaffed. As already indicated, nurse turnover leads to nursing shortages, and this opens a can of problems for the healthcare sector. Salar, Kiani, and Rezaee (2020) discovered that medication errors increase in the event that nurses’ ratio to patients reduces. Medication errors directly infringe on the quality of care and endanger the lives of patients. Therefore, there is a need to help curb nurse turnover rates.
The other way that nurse turnover impacts the quality of care and infringes on patient safety is through the new recruits. Every time a nurse quits, they have to be replaced to help ease the workload on the other nurses. Dewanto and Wardhani (2018) aptly indicate that the recruitment of new nurses directly impacts the services of a healthcare organization. After the recruitment process, new nurses often go through a training and orientation phase where they are expected to get acquainted with their new working environment. During this phase, service provision is greatly hampered, as is the quality of service offered. In the end, patients end up getting mediocre service, and their safety and outcomes are dealt a blow.
Professional Standards of Practice
The management of every healthcare organization has to be wary of the nurse turnover trends within their facility. There is a need to stay abreast with such trends and adopt measures and strategies that will help rectify or sufficiently deal with the issue at hand. There are various professional standards of practice that need to be demonstrated to help address and mitigate the nurse turnover issue.
First, there is a need to promote a healthy working environment for the nurses. High retention rates are quite difficult to attain if the working environment is not pleasant to the staff members. According to Kelly (2020), retaining nurses who are late and...