Effects of Nursing Shortage and How to Reduce It

Nursing Shortage
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Introduction
The state of nursing shortage worldwide has led to an adverse impact on healthcare. Nurse shortage has led to nurses working for long hours and under stressful conditions. This harsh working condition may lead to fatigue, injury and generally work dissatisfaction in the nursing sector. This is dangerous as they are prone to making medical mistakes and errors. International council of nurses (ICSs), which is an international body for nursing associations, has done various research in the nursing profession and came up with essential strategies on how to reduce nursing shortage.
The main areas to be prioritized include : policymaking intervention, funding, labour plan, macroeconomics and leadership in the nursing sector. Despite these global interventions, long term solution nursing shortage has not been found yet. This article discusses an overview of nursing shortage which has become a global crisis due to rapid population growth leading to more demand for nursing. Will focus on various research done, their limitations, controversies, differences/similarities to this crisis. Their perspectives and intervention strategies compared and contrasted.
Review
Early research used to take sharp critic on the quality of services offered by nurses. Over the past, nurses have been identified to be among the most critical professionals in the world. In recent past medical reports have been recording a lot of errors during their duties, in result reducing Medicare. The rise of medical error narratives created a great in the healthcare departments. In the research “medication errors as malpractice” (Björkstén et al., 2016), explains how medical errors are caused by too much work which reduces concentration due to fatigue and a busy mind with multiple tasks. In this research, 585 nurses recorded errors during the 11-year study in Sweden and found out that most of them were done due to multi-tasking when interviewed. It’s concluded in this research that errors made during medication are due to demanding work.
Safarpour and his team (2017) contradict this research with their work "Patient Safety Attitudes, Skills, Knowledge and Barriers Related to Reporting Medical Errors by Nursing Students". Medical students that reported medical errors during this research had a positive attitude, saying that these errors are reasonable and it's not due to too much work. The busy schedule of the nurses may limit these two studies. As earlier explained, nurses in health units and hardly find free time. They have a lot to cover during their normal duties. The research manages to interview only a few nurses and much fewer interviews for the nursing management.
Nursing shortage has been a tough riddle to unravel by the Thailand government. Nursing education students (Abhicharttibutra et al., 2017) in Chian Mai university came up with research “Analysis of a government policy to address nursing shortage and nursing education quality”. In this research, they interviewed in-depth 28 nursing informants and found out that majority of them were not involved in nursing policymaking. Discovered that the Thailand government and implemented the polici...