Discussion: Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues

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IMPACT OF COMPETING NEEDS TO DEVELOPMENT OF A POLICY 6

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by providing additional thoughts about competing

need

s that may impact your colleagues’ selected issues, or additional ideas for applying po

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to address the impacts described

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POST 1

Impact of competing needs to development of a policy

Policies advocate for different agendas with

in

any organization

that require to be aligned

to the competing

demands that impact the development of these policies, such as workforce,

resources, and patient’s needs.

For instance,

there is a need to formulate policies that address

nurses’ adequate staffing

to meet the crew and patient needs while reducing the finan

cial cost.

Effective deployment and utilization of force within an organization are essential in ensuring

quality and efficient healthcare service delivery regarding price, quality, safety, and quantity.

The

organization’s failure to deploy and utilize the available workforce effectively results in an

oversupply or

shortage

of nursing staff. For instance, an excess of nursing staff results

in

economic inefficiencies

and misallocation of resources under the

li

keness of adequate staffing

(

Lopez et al

.

, 2015

)

Shortage of staffing in nursing is associated with

various negative impacts

like low quality and quantity patient care caused by few resources meant

to provide essential

services;

nurse burnouts caused by h

eavy workloads, compromised patient safety, and

longer

waiting hours due to inadequate staffing which lead to preventable deaths.

Competing for a

need

that impact workload

Balancing the needs of the patients and nurse staffing is a specific competing need within national healthcare issues that impact workload. Many organizations tend to explore various schemes in ensuring a proper balance in the middle of expertise in nursing staff, size, and patient’s needs in making sure that safe and quality services are provided to patients under sustainable operation costs. According to Van Den Oetelaar et al. (2016), patients’ needs and nursing capacity should match optimally; this can be achieved by a fair and sensible distribution of nurses in units that result in an equally distributed and manageable workload for nursing staff. This ensures a good fit balance between patients’ needs and nursing staff, hence balancing the available and needed resources and averting more costs for overstaffing (van den Oetelaar et al., 2016). This results in reduced patient experiences and employee engagement by inadequate staffing.

Impacts and how policy addresses the competing needs

It’s evident that workload impacts both staff and patient needs and resources in any organization. Nurse burnouts result in poor outcomes and errors in inpatient care. Heavy workloads also lead to burnouts and job dissatisfaction and even causes turnover among the nurses due to high costs in training new nurses and using temporary employees in the organization. The policy will help address the competing needs by ensuring that an optimal patient to nurse ratio is achieved, which will help improve nurse staffing and patient outcomes. It will help outline particular patient-to-nurse balances depending on various units within the healthcare organization (Livanos, 2018). Staffing policies within healthcare are essential in improving working conditions for nurses and quality and safe patient care. This will significantly reduce the costs of training new staff, use temporary employees, and reduce turnover among nursing staff.

Policies Development and the impact of cyber-attack on competing needs.

Nurses today must be legally and ethically aware of their scope of practice to develop effective policies that address competing needs. Today’s nurses are called to be at the forefront of policies development as transformational leaders. The nurse’s expertise is crucial on a team of policy makers. Nurses have expertise in areas of the needs of the patients, resources to be allocated for care as well as staffing needs. Competing needs in health care impact the development of policies because they should align with the target the policy is advocating for in the first place. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of Cyber-attacks on the development of policies and the resources to be allocated to the policies.  

Cyber-attack and policy on staffing needs

Transformational leadership is a process through which leaders influence others by changing the understanding of others of what is important (Broome and Marshall ,2021). Nursing shortage has caused many hospitals to develop policies dedicated to increase nurse’s retention as well as attracting new nurses. However, policies developed such as mandatory overtime aim to harm nurses. Burnout is the leading cause of medical mistakes; overworked workforce makes mistakes that are harmful to patients and costly to institutions (Hall et al, 2016). Those mistakes may have legal consequences. Therefore, nurses must be aware of their scope of practice in the state where they are employed. Cyberattacks add strain to the overworked nurses by creating paperwork they might not be familiar with but must learn on the spot. In Working with individuals, Laureate Education (2009b) stressed that leadership must have strong interpersonal skills to relate to staff working conditions, especially when explaining why a task must be done when the task is hard to do. In dealing with cyberattack and nursing shortage in our hospital, the leadership team listened to the needs of the nurses and took the ethical step of allowing nurses to create a staffing pool made of current part time nurses who could fill in whenever there was a need. The leadership team also trained the entire staff on workflow needed when the computers are down. This approach empowered the staff and showed appreciation. They created policies where the staffing pool nurses have requirements to work. This helped to completely remove the policy of mandatory overtime therefore helping in nurse’s retention.

Cyber-attack and policy on patient’s needs

Cyberattack put a strain to patient’s needs by delaying the care providing to them. During our cyberattack, most diabetic patients experience significant delay getting their insulin and their meals tray. Insulin administration requires 2 nurses checking systems following recommendation from the Joint commission and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (Mobic et al, 2016). The 2 nurses check help to significantly reduce insulin errors, which could be deadly. During downtime, an extensive paperwork trail had to be filled out to justify giving insulin which caused significant delays for our patient. The leadership team developed policies to address delay in patient care thus creating a safety nurse whose job aimed to fill out diabetic paperwork and other needed paperwork while the patients were being care for. That policy helped to diminish delays in patient care overall and increased patient satisfaction despite being in a middle of a cyberattack.

Conclusion

Safe policy development is an essential step in keeping patients and the workforce running effectively. Nursing leadership helps to develop policies that are aligned with the needs of the workforce because of their expertise and proximity to the needs. Policies must address competing needs to be effective. Cyberattacks put an added strain to the workforce and extra steps must be taken to improve patients care during cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks amplify competing needs and only a competent and caring transformational leadership team is able to effectively tackle them.

 

References

Broome, M. E. & Marshall E. S. (2021). Transformation leadership in nursing: From expert 

          clinician to influential leader. New York, NY: Springer.

Laureate Education. (Producer). (2009b). Working with Individuals. [Video File]. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Hall, L. H., & Johnson, J. & O’Connor, D.B. (2016, Jul 8). PLoS One: Health care staff  Wellbeing,

        Burnout and Patient Safety: A systematic review. Public Library of Science Journal 11 (7).

        https/doi;10.1371/journal.pone.0159015

Mobic, M.B. & Albert, N.M & Sun, Z. (2016, April 20). The journal of Nursing administration:

        Does insulin double checking procedure improve patient safety? (46) 154-60.     

www.psnet.ahrq.gov/issue

.

POST 2

Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues

Leadership in nursing is faced with challenges such as those associated with resource allocation and competing health needs. This calls for a deep analysis of contextual healthcare delivery system to establish the best solution for prevailing healthcare issues. The identified national healthcare issue relates to shortage of nurses, which falls under the human resource. This shortage instills a situation whereby the needs compete between solving the shortage and minimizing on the costs and expenses incurred in service delivery (Kelly & Porr, 2018). This may affect a healthcare system and in turn affects national healthcare sector. Additionally, the competing needs impact policy development since efforts to satisfy the needs should align with the aspects a certain policy is advocating for. For instance, a policy developed to address nurse shortage should address the needs of the workforce and patients and, at the same time, keeping the financial costs low (American Nurses Association, 2015). Therefore, an error in addressing an issue may lead to an imbalance of the competing needs.

The identified health stressor of shortage of nurses leads to increase in workload for the available nurse practitioners. This workload may lead to extra fatigue and burnouts, which may cause medical errors. The workload may also reduce the nurses’ satisfaction for the job, causing high turnover rates and subsequently high operational costs on using contractual workforce. An appropriate policy can address the issue by ensuring that a health facility has the recommended nurse-patient ratio in various departments in a facility, as Livanos (2018) suggests. This will improve the working conditions and care delivery, which upgrades the national healthcare system outcomes.

 
References

American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. Silver Spring, MD: Author. Retrieved from: https://www.nursingworld.org/coe-view-only

Kelly, P., & Porr, C. (2018). Ethical nursing care versus cost containment: Considerations to enhance RN practice. OJIN: Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1), Manuscript 6. doi:10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No01Man06. Retrieved from: http://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-23-2018/No1-Jan-2018/Ethical-Nursing-Cost-Containment.html 

Livanos, N. (2018). A Broadening Coalition: Patient Safety Enters the Nurse-To-Patient Ration Debate. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 9(1), 68-70.

Running head:
IMPACT OF COMPETING NEEDS TO DEVELOPMENT OF A POLICY
1

Respon
d

to
tw
o

of
T
H
E

P
O
S
T

B
E
L
O
W

by providing additional thoughts about competing
needs that may impact your colleagues’ selected issues, or additional ideas for applying policy
to address the impacts described
.

P
O
S
T

1

Impact of competing needs to development of a policy

Policies advocate for different agendas within any organization

that require to be aligned
to the competing
demands that impact the development of these policies, such as workforce,
resources, and patient’s needs.
For instance,
there is a need to formulate policies that address
nurses’ adequate staffing
to meet the crew and patient needs while reducing the finan
cial cost.
Effective deployment and utilization of force within an organization are essential in ensuring
quality and efficient healthcare service delivery regarding price, quality, safety, and quantity.
The

organization’s failure to deploy and utilize the available workforce effectively results in an
oversupply or
shortage

of nursing staff. For instance, an excess of nursing staff results
in
economic inefficiencies

and misallocation of resources under the
li
keness of adequate staffing

(
Lopez et al
.
, 2015
)

Shortage of staffing in nursing is associated with
various negative impacts
like low quality and quantity patient care caused by few resources meant

to provide essential
services;

nurse burnouts caused by h
eavy workloads, compromised patient safety, and
longer
waiting hours due to inadequate staffing which lead to preventable deaths.

Competing for a
need

that impact workload