Impact of Nursing and Physician Shortage

Nurse and Physician shortages are the key elements to unrealistic workloads. Due to the staffing issue, higher demands on the nurses affect the care of the patients. Due to the shortage, it forces nurses & physicians to work longer hours, which causes injury, fatigue and burnouts. (Fedele, 2017) Even through varies mental health issues and even physical problems Physicians are expected to work their entire shifts despite how they may be feeling. Burnout is a different level of regular stress; burnout occurs when a physician or nurse are have a stressed and overworked mentally and physically. A four-state survey of 95,499 registered nurses, were assessed regarding the working conditions in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. The Nurses answer questioned about their setting, role, work environment, experience of burnout and job satisfaction. (McHugh,2012) The goal of the survey is to examine nurses' job satisfaction and burnout by the faculty setting, and their roles. From the nurses that were surveyed it was found that about 51 percent who provided direct patient care in a hospital setting than nursing homes, expressed dissatisfaction of their jobs and the feeling of being burned out. (McHugh, 2012) It is found that patient satisfaction is lower in healthcare organizations where nurses are feeling burned out and dissatisfied with their working conditions.

The nurse to patient ratio contributes to the nurses' workload but also it affects the welfare of the patient as well. Healthcare organizations demand for physicians and nurses to perform unrealistic workloads, many healthcare professionals are starting to create shortcuts to decrease the time that they are spending with patients. This put many patients in dangerous situations and also causing a negative impact on the healthcare organization. Another huge impact in a negative nurse and physician outcomes are they miss time to complete their entire workload when they are overworked. When these healthcare professionals are overworked, they tend to lack the full amount time to complete the all of their tasks that is required to be finished by the end of their shift. Physicians and nurse will not be able to meet the needs of their patients because of the longer shifts they are being require to work and also the excessive amount of patients that are needing to be cared for. This does not only effect hospitals this also effects primary care physicians and general practices.

This will cause patient satisfaction to decrease and cause a negative health risk to their patients. Morality rates are showing increasing due to the understaffing of nurses; Flavia Munn provides results from a study that was completed in nine European countries that found the increase of mortality rates when patient care is missed, Each 10% increase in the amount of care left undone was associated with a 16% increase in the likelihood of a patient dying after a common surgical procedure, the study shows. (Munn,2017) . Research completed in England between 2008 and 2012, show that one on one nursing in the infants intensive care unit decrease by about one-third. Because of this decrease statistic are showing that the average 4.5 infants in 100 died each month. (Nursing Standard, 2014) Unfortunately, this is a realistic reality that is affecting a great number of the countries throughout the world due to the lack of nurses and physicians available to care for the patients.

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