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Review of Current Healthcare Issues: Workload

Workload in nursing care is a global problem, especially in the United States. Nurse’s experiences increased workload due to the high demand in healthcare services resulting to an increase in demand for nurses, increased overtime, and reduced staffing of nurses, reduction in the length of stay among patients, and inadequate supply of nurses (Biganeh, Abolghasemi, Alimohammadi, Ebrahimi, Torabi & Ashtarinezhad, 2018). Nursing workload measures are categorized into different levels. The measures are organized into hierarchy system that include situation and patient level workload, job level workload, job level workload and unit level workload (Sun, Bai, Li, Lin, Zhang & Cao, 2017). Primarily, the unit or level of workload determines the amount of workload for nurses. Some units, such as nurses working in the operation units have high workload compared to nurses working in regular words. The nurse patient ratios are also used to determine workload, especially for nurses working in the unit level. 

High nurse workload in various levels of operations in healthcare facilities has significant influence in my work setting. As a practicing nurse, I have experience high workload at some point in my nursing career and it had adverse impacts on my work setting. For instance, it had negative impacts on patient’s safety. The main aim of health administration is to ensure patient safety and improved outcome (Rees, Eley, Osseiran-Moisson, Francis, Cusack, Heritage & Hegney, 2019). However, that is not likely to be achieved when nurses experience burnout due to high workload (Sun et al., 2017). Patient nurse ration should be made efficient to allow nurses sufficient time to concentrate,

rate on individual cases of patient. I am likely not to give my best to my patients when I experience burnout due to high workload. Heavy workload significantly affects my job satisfaction.

 Thus, I am likely to leave my current facility to seek for another workstation that would provide enough workload to enable me provide the best to patients, and allow me enough time to attend to other activities that contribute to job satisfaction. Nonetheless, it affects me because sometimes I may be required to perform non-professional tasks such as delivering food and retrieving trays. Such tasks kill my morale and make me question my professional mandate to provide nursing care to patients. Heavy nurse workload causes distress in me, thus, reducing my efficiency and ability to meet my nursing objectives. Distress may force me to make errors that I would otherwise not commit with sufficient workload.

My health system work setting has responded to the stressor by employing more nurses to help in various units. However, the facility has not achieved the nurse-patient requirement ratio due to high operation cost. Nonetheless, the organization has created positive and supportive work environment (Sun et al., 2017). The organization is making changes, especially with long and unpredictable shift work. Nurses now have time to have fun in various ways such as encouraging them to laugh with family members. Besides, they can have private time with patients and staff to discuss ways of improving health outcome. The facility is helping nurses to prioritize by letting them know that sometimes it is okay to say no, especially when more workload is being added on your schedule, and this is likely to affect your productivity (Sun et al., 2017). For example, nurses should prioritize the needs of the patients, urgent tasks, and the consequences of failing to undertake certain tasks immediately.