Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened many issues that arise from the competing needs of various healthcare actors, including policymakers, pharmaceutical businesses, hospital leaders, frontline medical workers, and patients. In this regard, one of the issues that hospital managers encounter is the desire to provide better service with minimum material investments. Before COVID-19, the researchers had already reported the problem of healthcare providers’ overworking and increased turnover rate numerous times (Patel et al., 2018). This, in turn, led to reduced work satisfaction, anxiety, and depression.
Discussion
However, during the pandemic, this issue aggravated further despite the substantial media coverage regarding the heroic work of medical staff. For instance, the recent report by Kaufman Hall (2021) indicated that 100% of the studied hospital managers faced problems related to staff burnout, filling vacancies, and high turnover rates. Moreover, Cantor et al. (2022) found that despite significant investments in the healthcare sector by the government, the wage changes in this sphere were the lowest compared to all the other industries. As such, while in 2020, the salaries increased by 5% in the healthcare sector and 6.7% in other spheres, in the first two quarters of 2021, the growth rate was 1.5% and 6.9% accordingly. Therefore, it is seen that workers’ financial and mental well-being is the primary cost that the hospitals are ready to keep low.
Additionally, another issue that managers of medical institutions encounter is the desire to receive greater revenues and the need to ensure patient safety. In this respect, most of the hospitals around the country experienced reduced profits due to a surge in costs and a fall in the number of patients (Birkmeyer et al., 2020). The latter is partly explained by the need to maintain social distance. However, there is a risk that such a situation may eventually lead to growing prices for the provided services.
As for the organization I work at, there is also a problem of staff overwork, burnout, and a relatively low salary raise. Although there are fewer patients attending the infusion center, the amount of work and work-related stress only grew. This resulted in the growth of mistakes and a reduction in the medical staff’s physical and mental well-being. Moreover, even though the overall expenditures of the facility grew, most of the investments were made in the purchase of masks, sanitizers, projection screens, and other materials to ensure patient safety. As a consequence, hiring additional staff or a salary raise would result in further revenue reduction or would lead to the necessity to increase the payments for the provided services.
Thus, it is seen that from the perspective of ethics, the current practice is problematic. How the limited resources that the organization possesses are distributed implies that at least one group of stakeholders – infusion center managers, medical staff, and patients – would be worse off. For this reason, the strength of the current practice is that the costs for the services for the community members remained the same, which guarantees the high availability of medicine to people with various income levels. However, at the same time, its weakness is an unequal distribution of benefits between various actors. Therefore, it can be concluded that this practice has some positive and negative aspects in terms of promoting ethics in the organization.
Conclusion
To reduce the current practice’s weaknesses and balance the competing needs of the stakeholders mentioned above, it is suggested that facilities that face these types of problems start building deeper relations with Universities. In particular, the hospitals can start offering internships to future doctors, which would increase the number of staff, thus, reducing the workload per employee. Additionally, students majoring in business management can be involved in dealing with administrative problems, which would further alleviate the workload of medical workers.
References
Birkmeyer, J. D., Barnato, A., Birkmeyer, N., Bessler, R., & Skinner, J. (2020). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospital admissions in the United States: Study examines trends in US hospital admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic.Health Affairs, 39(11), 2010-2017. Web.
Cantor, J., Whaley, C., Simon, K., & Nguyen, T. (2022). US health care workforce changes during the first and second years of the COVID-19 pandemic.JAMA Health Forum, 3(2), e215217-e215217. Web.
Kaufman Hall. (2021). 2021 State of healthcare performance improvement report: COVID creates a challenging environment. Web.
Patel, R. S., Bachu, R., Adikey, A., Malik, M., & Shah, M. (2018). Factors related to physician burnout and its consequences: A review. Behavioral Sciences, 8(11), 98-105.