The ultimate goal of any scholarly medical research is to ensure positive changes in the empirical clinical practice, as the existing theoretical frameworks present little value to the professionals when not implemented in real life. As far as nursing practice is concerned, one may note that while much attention is paid to the specifics of the “nurse-patient” paradigm, significantly less scholarly effort is put into the examination of the nurses’ well-being in modern clinical settings. One of the most common issues nurses face today is inadequate staffing within the facility. Essentially, inadequate responsibility allocation among the nurses in a certain healthcare organization inevitably results in poor patient outcomes and missed nursing care (Ball et al., 2018). The latter stands for the process of care omission and delays in providing the required interventions.
Although this issue has existed for a long time, the scopes of this problem have increased drastically since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the researchers, increased patient vulnerability to the COVID-19 infection is explicitly correlated with inadequate staffing within the facilities, as nurses are incapable of paying enough attention to every patient in order to define their risks of being infected (Harrington et al., 2020). Thus, it is evident that more scholarly research is required in this area of nursing practice due to its relevance in the modern professional context. Moreover, while many researchers try to analyze the issue in the paradigm of patient outcomes, there is little academic proof on how poor staffing affects nurses’ mental and physical health, satisfaction, and retention patterns. Hence, it may be concluded that there is currently a gap in the sphere of scholarly evaluation of nursing staffing. Once the gap is bridged, clinical managers will be able to reconsider minimum requirements for staff and nurses’ duties in order to avoid emotional and physical burnout and low retention rates among nurses.
References
Ball, J. E., Bruyneel, L., Aiken, L. H., Sermeus, W., Sloane, D. M., Rafferty, A. M.,… & RN4Cast Consortium. (2018). Post-operative mortality, missed care and nurse staffing in nine countries: a cross-sectional study.International Journal of Nursing Studies, 78, 10-15.
Harrington, C., Ross, L., Chapman, S., Halifax, E., Spurlock, B., & Bakerjian, D. (2020). Nurse staffing and coronavirus infections in California nursing homes. Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 21(3), 174-186.