Inadequate Patient Staffing

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Inadequate staffing of nurse can directly affect the quality of care given to a patient and result in poor patient outcomes. “Nurse managers must make skilled staffing and scheduling decisions to ensure that safe and cost-effective care is provided by the appropriate level of caregivers” (Sportsman, 2015, pp. 256). With emphasis on patient safety and positive outcomes, research suggest that increasing the number of registered nurses results in many positive benefits to the patient (Sportsman, 2015). This paper will discuss organizational policies and procedures for assigning staff to an Emergency Department, as well as feedback regarding staffing from nurses in that department. After conducting an interview with several staff nurses the …show more content…
The inpatient units in the hospital are at full capacity, when this happens the patients will often remain in the Emergency Department until an inpatient bed becomes available. This process can take several days. Emergency Departments do not stop taking patients when they become full. Occasionally, a float nurse will come to the department and take care of the inpatient holds. However, there is not always a float nurse available. Additionally, we must consider the acuity of patients. It is expected that a registered nurse (RN), to care for up to six medical/surgical patients, however most of the time we have much higher acuity patients awaiting beds. Critical patients need a lot of time dedicated to care, and it is unreasonable to assign a nurse, more than two critical patients. As a result, the remaining nurses must be assigned more patients, which leads to an even higher nurse to patient ratio. (Blagburn, 2018). Blagburn recommends having a nurse on call to come during these times. According to another source, staffing is not appropriate to handle and influx of high acuity patients that arrive simultaneously. Staffing only 5 nurses on night shift with an unlimited possibility of patients, moreover, an influx of critical
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