Long Term Care Facilities Offer Nursing Care

Inadequate nurse staffing has become a major issue when it comes to patient safety. Having a unit function with not enough staff not only puts patients at risk for adverse events, it also puts the nurse at risk for potential errors. In the following paragraphs, information will be provided on how changing the number of nurses on the unit, will improve patient care. Literature will be discussed and will provide evidence that changing nurse-patient ratios not only improves the quality of care the patient receives, it also decreases the chances of errors. A change theory will also be discussed and will explain how it helps implement change in a hospital setting and how it will be used to implement change. Finally information on how the inter-professional

Most hospitalized patients of 65 years and above have been established to be more vulnerable to falling within their homes or in a facility. These falls have been attributed to various causative agents that need to be assessed and managed in an attempt to completely avert falls (Wilbert, 2010). Prevention of falls should be mandatory since they cause more danger to patients, including breakage of the main bones and even death. As a result, the patient may develop a more serious condition such as decrease functional immobility in addition to that which caused hospitalization. Most of these falls have been found to be caused by therapeutic impacts and ignored diagnostic information (Naqvi, Lee & Fields, 2009). For instance, a great number of elderly people who are hospitalized are diagnosed with dementia at the time of admission; hence, such information needs to be taken into consideration during the care of such a patient. Dementia is likely to cause disorientation and confusion which may result in recurrent falls. Therefore, falls may be described as the abrupt and unintended loss of uprightness that leads to body displacement towards the ground falls (Wilbert, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to develop a falls prevention, management program that will reduce the number of falls occurring within an organization.

Shortage of nursing staff in the long-term care continues to rise due to a couple of reasons. Many studies have revealed several factors that play a significant role in nursing shortages over the years. These factors include health care organizations downsizing the number of staff on a unit and increasing workloads, prolong work hours, and the people leaving the workforce. These factors have a significant impact on the quality of care in the long-term setting. This paper will compare and contrast the effect of lack of staffing has on the quality of patient care in a long-term settings. Over the years, the toll of the economy has had an impacted on the healthcare system which led to the reduction in the number of nursing staff and increasing the workload.

Hello Dr. Ullom, majority of the long term care facilities are under staffed. There is usually one registered nurse in charge to manage a 240 bed facility, with LPN's  and nursing assistance. I feel that these patients would benefit from having one RN to every six -eight patients with a nursing assistance. Not only would this benefit the patient but the nurse as well. Patient are placed in long term care facility with a certain problem, but ends up with additional condition such as UTI, MRSA, pressure ulcers, and etc. These issues are related to poor care they receive because of unstaffing. I'm not placing blame on the LPN or nursing assistance, but with a RN and low nurse to patient ratio, they will receive better care.

Roles of Administrator and Case Managers in this facility vs. roles of Administrator and Case Manager in other facilities

Long term care facilities use Joint Commission Accreditation as a benefit to show the quality and commitment to the health care organization. A long term care facility that is Joint Commission accredited will have a more appealing look to reimbursement centers and to the patient and families that they care for. Having this accreditation is also a risk management tool. The likelihood of a bad outcome is reduced if a facility is accredited by the Joint Commission. There is a team put together to come up with accreditation standards and to make sure facilities stay compliant with these standards. Performance is evaluated to ensure standards are followed.

Significance: Because nursing is the largest health care profession and nurses provide most of the patient care, and as an acute nurse, I can relate to how unsafe nurse staffing/low nurse-to-patient ratios can have negative impact on patient satisfaction and outcome, can lead to medical and/or medication errors and nurse burnout. It can also bring about anxiety and frustration, which can also clouds the nurses’ critical thinking. Most patients might not know the work load on a particular nurse and can assume that her nurse is just not efficient. Doctors also can become very impatient with their nurses because orders are not being followed through that can delay treatments to their patients. There is also delays in attending to call lights resulting in very unhappy patients who needed help.

The research studies reviewed all share a common theme that staffing and patient care make a safe care environment. The patient safety conditions all are enhanced by adequate staffing and nurse retention. Nursing turnover leads to reduced staffing and affects the patient’s outcomes and overall satisfaction. The point of agreement is that nurse staffing and the environment has a positive effect on patient safety, outcomes, and satisfaction.

Adequate staff is vital in keeping Patient safe and keep up a positive patient Outcomes

Martin’s journals stated that adequate staffing levels have been shown to reduce mortality rate by more than fifty percent. Staffing levels in nursing care are attributed to poor quality of care, more adverse reactions and leads to higher rates of job dissatisfaction and burn out rates. Inadequate staffing make it harder for the nurse to ethically abide by their requirements of providing patients with nonmaleficence and beneficence. There is an umbrella of people that are affected in different ways due to the understaffing. Patients and their loved ones are affected due to less quality of care as there is less amount of time allotted for everyone, with research showing that an increase in different medical emergencies such as Shock, Cardiac arrest, and Urinary tract infection are

For too long, people have been sustaining unintentional injury and death in hospital due to falls. The most heartfelt are the elderly, cognitive impaired patients, and feeble patients. Fall in the hospital is one of the most crucial patient safety issues. Most times nurses do not take adequate measures to prevent this. According to Shuey and Balch (2014) the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported that approximately 26,000 deaths were attributed to unintentional falls. This statistics is alarming. Do we fold our arms and watch for people to continue to get injured and die? No, there is the need to prevent hospital falls among the elderly, cognitive challenged patients, and fragile patients and something has to be done about it now. It is crucial to address this issue now to maintain the core value of nursing profession.

The priority issue is safe staffing for nurses working in hospitals. This issue is a priority because many times nurses are overwhelmed with his or her patient load and cannot provide safe, effective patient care. With such a heavy emphasis on patient outcomes and patient satisfaction, more attention should be dedicated to this issue. Research studies consistently find that whenever there is high patient-nurse ratio it negatively impacts patient safety. A great number of studies have demonstrated that higher nurse staffing levels and richer skill mix have a strong association with reduced adverse patient outcomes (Twigg, Gelder, & Myers, 2015). This paper will discuss policy priority issue of safe staffing by identifying key points, providing supporting empirical evidence and recommendations to improve safe staffing, and the impact and importance safe staffing has on nursing.

One of the greatest challenges in healthcare, as well as the biggest threat to patient safety, is staffing and the nurse to patient ratio on hospital floors. Studies have shown that low staffing levels lead to increased mortality rates in patients, as well as multiple other adverse effects including falls and pressure ulcers. These adverse effects are all preventable, but policies on staffing must be in place to ensure safety for staff and patients.

A universal aspiration for all Registered Nurses (RN) and workplace environments is to create a safe atmosphere for both the client and employees. The RN has an obligation to ensure, “a culture of safety by using established occupational health and safety practices, and other safety measures to protect client, self and colleagues from injury or potentially abusive situations” (Saskatchewan Registered Nurses’ Association, 2007, p. 11). This competency guides RN’s to provide and advocate safe practice environments. Thus, the issue this paper will discuss is Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). The population being focused on is home care, which is, “care provided to patients in their homes to restore their functional capacity, to allow

Health system of any organization relies primarily on the safety of the patient. Identification of problem and finding a solution for the concerned problem is primary target to maintain the quality services of the aged care facilities.