Nursing Workloads Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay Paper (Essay Sample)

Nursing Workload and Patient Safety
Name
Institution
Date
The nursing workload is a major issue for the health care setting. Currently, nurses experience higher workload due to delays in patient length of stay, low staff and increased overtime, insufficient quantity of nurses, and increased demand for nursing staff. High cost pressure has made health care settings to lessen the length of stay. From the 1990s, healthcares reduced the number of nurses and enforced obligatory overtime guidelines to meet suddenly high demands that augmented workloads of nurses significantly. Furthermore, nursing staff supply is not adequate to meet contemporary demands (MacPhee, Dahinten, Havaei, 2017). As a result, the shortage is expected to increase in the future as demand increases. The demand is also increasing due to the aging of the population. Human factors frameworks have become popular methods to evaluate the workload of nurses at certain levels namely; unit level, job level, patient level, and situation level. The unit level involves the level of staffing and the ability of deliberations. The job level is grounded in the acuities of nurses concerning the quantity of labor to be performed (Carayon, Gürses, 2015). Task level reflects the means of a nurse to perform a certain job. Heavy nurse workload can result in job dissatisfaction and burnout. This paper discusses models and concepts of nursing workloads and then discusses the effect of nursing workload on patient safety.