Nurses are at the heart of the healthcare system. Nursing is a high-pressure job that comes with a lot of responsibilities including caring for patients, assisting in different medical procedures, keeping paperwork updated and so much more. Although it might seem glamorous at first, a closer look reveals that nurses are facing a few problems in today’s world. Here are some of the most pressing issues.
Nurse Safety and Work Hazards
A hospital is often a dangerous place for nurses in ways that most of us cannot see. For example, nurses are prone to back and foot injuries due to the nature of their work. To ensure safe patient handling and nurse safety, hospitals are putting measures in place to provide assistive equipment and educate nurses on how to remain safe at work.
Second, there are hazards associated with sharp and heavy objects, as well as infections caused by exposure to bodily fluids. Needlestick injuries are of particular concern, as are cuts by scalpels. By bringing awareness to injuries like this and arming their nurses with knowledge about how to protect themselves, healthcare facilities have been able to reduce incidences of these injuries.
Workplace Violence and Abuse
Nurses suffer a lot of workplace violence from patients, clients, and residents. Areas where this is a huge concern include high-volume emergency rooms, acute psychiatric care departments, in-patient settings, long-term care settings, and social nursing care settings.
Nurses also experience a lot of harassment and bullying. These experiences include inappropriate social media outreach, patient stalking, and increased attempts to contact healthcare professionals outside a hospital setting. Because of this, there is an inherent threat posed to nurses and this is why a lot of bodies are putting guidelines in place to help nurses identify instances of harassment and bullying and avoid them. They are also there to provide better security at work and advise on lockdown procedures in case of a rowdy patient.
Inadequate Staffing
Having inadequate staffing is not a major problem in many industries and work environments. However, staff shortages in a hospital setting are very serious because they can be the difference between life and death.
Inadequate staffing affects both patients and nurses. Patients end up getting inadequate care because there are too many patients for any one nurse to handle. Inadequate staffing leads to increased pressure on nurses, higher injury rates, fatigue, and diminished ability to provide safe healthcare.
While inadequate staffing can be attributed to healthcare facilities trying to save money by having fewer members of staff, staff shortages can also be attributed to the increased demand for nurses in the healthcare system. This increase in demand is also due to a higher number of nurses retiring and the increase in the number of baby boomers who are living longer.
One thing to come out of this shortfall is an increase in the demand for qualified nurses. To take advantage of the good pay and job security occasioned by the higher demand for nurses, you can enroll in an accelerated nursing program and have your degree in about a year.
To find the right accelerated nursing program, you can use online platforms to help you find the right university as well as a program with the nursing specialization you are interested in. You can look online for specific programs in areas where there is a high and growing demand for nurses with a nursing degree. In Pennsylvania, for example, the number of nursing jobs will keep increasing, and you can easily find nursing programs for Pennsylvania residents using the following link: https://onlineabsnprograms.com/accelerated-nursing-programs-pennsylvania. There, you can also find programs tailored for residents from other areas, as well as have any questions you have about accelerated nursing programs and specialties answered.
Mandatory Overtime
The nursing shortage we have discussed above leads to longer working hours for the available nurses. Because of this, hospitals are seeing an increase in nurse turnover and an increase in nursing errors due to fatigue and loss of focus. To ensure facilities have enough nurses at any one time, they are starting to use mandatory overtime to ensure nurses complete a set number of work hours or shifts every week. This is a dangerous practice that has a negative effect on the quality of care provided and is driving nurses to specialties that do not require them to be at the bedside, such as in administration or outside the hospital. The latter leads to more staffing shortages and exposes one of the biggest reasons why mandatory staffing is such a huge problem.
Inadequate Self-care
Nursing is a high-stress, fast-moving job and this may be the reason why nurses often forget to take care of themselves. Nurses are also taught to care for others, and this may be the reason why we are seeing more nurses forgoing their own self-care to provide care to others. Ignoring self-care in this way can put a lot of strain on nurses which can lead to emotional and physical burnout as well as the inability to provide the right level of care. It is therefore important that healthcare facilities remind nurses to take some time off for themselves. This time can be used to meditate, read a book, listen to music, or anything else that does not involve thinking about the job.
Higher Patient Expectations
Patients now have higher expectations of our healthcare systems than they did a few years ago. This increase in the level of expectation has sadly not been followed by an increase in the satisfaction level on which the expectations were met. This is because nurses are not always able to meet patient expectations due to factors such as budget cuts and understaffing. Nurses who hear that patients are unhappy with the level of service provided can become demoralized and this can lead to even worse outcomes for more patients.
A career in nursing is already hard enough without all the external issues that the nursing industry faces. Although measures are being in place to help solve these problems, they still exist in some places.