Nurses Should Not Work More Hours During their Shifts Medicine Essay (Essay Sample)

Nurses Should Not Work More Hours During their Shifts
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Nurses Should Not Work More Hours During their Shifts
Understaffing is among the most hotly debated issues within the healthcare sector in America, especially with the current Covid-19 pandemic. The majority of hospitals in the U.S. tend to have a lower nurse turnover ratio, thereby undermining the quality of care. In this sense, it is imperative to examine the correlation between nurse staffing and patient safety to restore sanity in the nursing profession by improving medical services’ efficiency. Whereas recent coronavirus cases reveal that nurses working on long schedules have helped improve the quality of care, registered nurses (RNs) should not work more hours during their shifts because it causes trauma, curtail burnout, and patient mortality.
A low nurse-patient ratio affects work morale due to stress, which often leads to trauma among nurses. In most cases, RNs lack enough time to address their problems or spend with their families, thus being the main cause of tension and strain. According to Liu et al. (2018), nurses who work more shifts tend to experience high levels of depression and emotional fatigue due to constant pressure to meet tight deadlines. On that note, understaffed nurses may consider resigning from work, thereby increasing the probability of hospitals losing highly skilled RNs (McMurray & Clendon, 2018). The majority of hospitals may be obliged to seek emergency services from juniors or interns to fill the gap left by the seniors. The unfolding of events can lead to numerous work inconsistencies due to the lack of exceptional skills required for essential nursing operations, resulting in underperformance (Liu et al., 2018). Moreover, hospitals may incur unnecessary financial costs to train the junior interns, losing funds that could have instead been used to develop other vital sectors of the healthcare institutions.