What Are The Impact Of Nursing Shortage Has On Healthcare?

What Are The Impact Of Nursing Shortage Has On Healthcare? Nursing shortages have been an issue for several reasons, such as retiring nurses, an increase in demand from old patients, and recent pandemic situations that have hit the world.

To bridge this gap, nurse staffing agencies have been growing to be able to help in distributing nurses to medical facilities that need them, top healthcare staffing agency Louisiana is one of them.

What Causes Nursing Shortage?

There are several reasons such as:

Nurses Retiring

Many nurses are retiring and not enough nurses are coming in to replace them. Due to technological advances, old nurses tend to have a struggle in coping up with the technological updates in their workplace and most of them prefer to retire rather than take the stress of catching up with the technology. That’s why the number of nurses is decreasing.
Aging Population

People who are getting old are increasing and are usually in chronic conditions, which means they need all the healthcare they need. The number of health workers is not enough to attend to them and that results in a shortage of health workers. Most old people are placed in facilities where medical workers can take care of them. This has also contributed to the shortage of nurses since nurses handle these kinds of patients to attend to their medical needs. Old patients need a lot of supervision and monitoring most of the time, nurses check on them and the attention of nurses for other patients is lessened.
Pandemic

Due to the rise of COVID-19 cases, more and more patients are piling up in the hospitals. The nurses in each facility are not enough to attend to the needs of the patients, especially when they need close monitoring. In these cases, the nurse-patient ratio should be increased. Due to the lack of nurses, the attention given to people who are too sick is not enough.

How Does Nursing Shortage Affect Patient Safety?

Mortality of Patients Increases

With the shortage of nurses, patients are overlooked and not taken care of. The sad part is this leads to the death of some patients. Although nurses want to help patients, their time is not enough to attend to all the patients they have. They have to prioritize emergency situations.
Low Quality Patient Care

Nurses who have to attend to more than one patient at a time are being burned out. This results in not being able to give the quality of care the patient needs. Most of the nurses have to work for long hours since there are no nurses to work for the next shift. They don’t have any choice but to work even if they are exhausted. Nurses who are under strenuous conditions create errors and mistakes which affect the care they give to their patients. Nurses need rest so they can be able to recharge physically and mentally, but with the scarcity issue, they still have to work, although they are too tired to do so.

How Does The Nursing Shortage Affect The Economy?

Due to the demand for nurses to fill up shortages, hospitals are forced to increase pay to be able to get more nurses for their hospitals. Some even give sign – in bonuses to attract more nurses to apply in their medical facilities. The lack of nurses makes them in demand, right, which means an increased rate is happening. The increase and decrease in nurses’ salaries may affect the nursing labor market in the long run. But for now, medical facilities are creating their own techniques to be able to employ more nurses to bridge the scarcity they are facing right now.

Now the question: what is the impact of nursing shortage have on healthcare? Is answered what solutions are best to be able to solve this issue? Nurse staffing agencies are coming to the rescue to give solutions to shortages of nurses. They can hire qualified nurses and put them on board at the medical facilities that need them the most. This way, they can distribute the right number of nurses in each medical facility. With all the nurses we have in the world, shortages are still happening, so solutions need to be done before the negative effects rise. Nursing staffing agencies could be able to help in giving solutions to nursing shortages.