Relevance of Nurse-Patient Ratios in Contemporary Healthcare Settings

Nurse-Patient Ratios Paper
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Nurse-Patient Ratios Paper
Introduction
Nurses are an important component of the healthcare system. Appropriate nurse-patient staffing ratios constitute an important variable influencing the delivery of high-quality and safe care to positively impact patients’ care outcomes. Staffing affects the capacity of nurses to offer high-quality and safe care at the practice level as well as in diverse practice settings. The multifaceted nature of nursing care delivery makes determining the ideal nurse-patient staffing ratios increasingly complex. The solution does not entail simply recruiting nurses above what is needed. Although the nurse staffing issue is increasingly complex, it remains solvable. It challenges healthcare administrators to design and implement dynamic solutions adaptable to the constantly changing healthcare delivery framework. This report discusses the relevance of nurse-patient ratios in contemporary healthcare settings, applies the ethical principle to the issue under investigation, and specifies the ethical provision supporting my view. The paper also includes an evaluation of the basic organizational and systems leadership for quality care and patient safety as it relates to the issue. The last portion assesses the core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice applicable to the patient experiencing nurse-patient ratios.
Relevance of Nurse-Patient Ratios in Today’s Healthcare Setting
Growing nurse-to-patient ratios are imperative issues explored in nursing. In order to meet the demand for healthcare services, hospitals are having difficulty. They are always looking for methods to reduce expenses and boost productivity. Hospitals have been lowering the number of nurses on staff as one method of doing this (Simonetti et al., 2022). The ratio of nurses to patients has risen as a result. The issue with this is that it might result in a decline in the standard of care. Nurses discharge a vital role in preserving patient safety when providing care. Experienced registered nurses (RNs) have shown a correlation between the greater incidence of patient falls, diseases, prescription mistakes, and even mortality and insufficient nurse staffing levels (Cho et al., 2020). Because hospitals massively reduce their nursing budgets, coupled with problems presented by a rising nursing shortage, fewer nurses opt to work longer hours and provide care to patients (Carthon et al., 2019). Hence these circumstances compromise care and add to the nursing deficiency by producing an environment that pushes nurses from the bedside.
Aiken et al. (2018) assert that hospitals can determine their safe staffing benchmarks in most states. Safe nurse staffing levels are becoming more widely recognized as crucial to patient care and the development of the nursing profession. Support for minimum nurse staffing requirements imposed by the state and the federal government has recently increased. California was the first state to endorse legislation in 2004 requiring an average nurse-to-patient ratio. California’s criteria for medical-surgical units, the nurse-patient proportion...