The issue under consideration, low wages for healthcare workers and budget cuts, implies the presence of competing needs. They are expressed by the personnel’s desire to eliminate the risks of enhanced responsibility and burden due to the lack of employees’ and patients’ interest in timely and high-quality services. These conditions may impact the development of policy by creating additional problems, which should be addressed. The most common issues in this regard are specialists’ burnout and low satisfaction among people who need medical assistance (Kelly & Porr, 2018). As a result, the elaborated initiatives might be less efficient due to the continuously increasing number of aspects, which should be addressed.
The competing needs specified above reflect the ethical concerns of professionals in the field and directly affect the selected issue. For example, the perceived complications deriving from the emergence of more complicated conditions for work lead to a sense of powerlessness, frustration, tensions, and conflicts among the nurses (Kelly & Porr, 2018). As a result, their ability to make decisions within individualized patient-centered care becomes worse, and this situation implies risks for their patients (Milliken, 2018). They stem from the lack of awareness of employees regarding their needs for safe and ethical care.
In order to overcome the mentioned obstacles to rendering high-quality healthcare services, it is necessary to develop a policy addressing these competing needs. It should be based on the provisions of the Code of Ethics for Nurses and, more specifically, the primacy of the patients’ interests and duties to self and others complemented by sufficient compensations for professionals (“Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements,” n.d.). In other words, the orientation on the people’s needs should be their priority, but the work performed in the absence of a sufficient number of employees should be rewarded accordingly.
References
Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. (n.d.). American Nurses Association. Web.
Kelly, P., & Porr, C. (2018). Ethical nursing care versus cost containment: Considerations to enhance RN practice.OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1). Web.
Milliken, A. (2018). Ethical Awareness: What it is and why it matters. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1). Web.