PLEASE RESPOND TO THIS POST INCLUDE REFERENCE
PICOT QUESTION: Nursing Shortage in inpatient care facilities (P), does offering incentives, increasing pay, and use of agency nurses improve nursing shortage (I), when compared to not implementing solutions to improve understaffing (C), that will improve patient health outcomes (O), over a six-month timeframe (T)?
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Nursing shortage is practice problem all over the world and risks patients not receiving proper care which leads to patients’ health declining, safety issues, patient health decline (Witczak, 2021). Inpatient care settings are more likely to experience nursing shortage, higher patient care loads, and patient care that has a higher demand due to healthcare related issues (Hooper, 2022). Nursing shortage was at its highest is during the pandemic of COVID-19, which nurses left the inpatient care setting due to strain, fear, and choosing other career paths due to the virus (Baker, 2022). According to Li et al. (2022), “the nursing profession continues to face shortages due to a lack of potential educators, high turnover, and inequitable workforce distribution”. Inpatient care settings require teamwork because there are multiple units, multiple patients, and a decrease in nursing staff increases a chance for patients not receiving the care they need.
INTERVENTION: Increase nursing staff through agency nurses, offer incentives to promote new nurses, and offer increase of pay for nursing staff resigning with hopes that they will stay.
The inpatient population of hospitals are an important part of patient improvement and health outcomes. Interventions are important to incorporate because interventions help to ensure that the patient is satisfied, health improves, and death or decline in health is prevented. This is what make hiring nurses from agencies who are experienced, in which time is saved having to train new nurses. Incentives and increased pay provide a feeling of appreciation and promotes nursing to either stay or draws the attention of new nursing staff. The support of this intervention helps with efforts to improve nursing shortage in the inpatient population setting as well as the care patients receive in which the main focus would be to improve health outcomes. This practice problem is amenable to a research-based intervention because nursing shortage does exist, patient health is important, incentives and increased pay promotes and attracts the attention of nurses and agency nurses are vital because they are less likely to need weeks or months of training.
REFERENCES
Baker D. W. (2022). Addressing the Nursing Shortage in the United States: An Interview with Dr. Peter Buerhaus. Joint Commission journal on quality and patient safety, 48(5), 298–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2022.02.006
Hooper V. D. (2022). The Future of Nursing 2022: It Is Time for Us to Take the Lead. Journal of perianesthesia nursing : official journal of the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses, 37(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jopan.2021.12.001
Witczak, I., Rypicz, Ł., Karniej, P., Młynarska, A., Kubielas, G., & Uchmanowicz, I. (2021). Rationing of Nursing Care and Patient Safety. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 676970. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.676970
