Overview
Nurses are at the forefront in providing patient care. At the same time, medical institutions work without interruptions, and a clear shift transition is necessary to maintain their activities. Nursing essentially presupposes teamwork and adequate nursing staff levels (Duffield et al.). For this reason, there is a need to address the problem of delay to work. In nursing practice, a critical issue that goes unnoticed is nurses’ overworking during a shift when another employee is late. At this time, the burden on the nurse increases significantly. This leads to disruption to the medical organization’s work as a whole, but, most importantly, it negatively affects the quality of medical services.
Problem
The importance of well-coordinated teamwork and responsibility of each employee in medical organizations is obvious. However, unfortunately, the lack of discipline remains a fairly common problem (Griffiths et al.). The late arrival of an employee for work leads to the fact that their workload is transferred to the remaining medical personnel. During this time, an intensive process of overworking occurs, which is dangerous from two points of view, interconnected with each other. On the one hand, the quality of the provided medical services decreases and the likelihood of medical error increases (Carlesi et al.). This, in turn, can also negatively affect the operation of the medical institution itself, as it will increase the burden on the healthcare unit in the form of judicial and administrative proceedings (Nishizaki et al.).
Research also shows that late workers affect the organization’s productivity, especially if they do not make up for the lost hours they did not work (Nishizaki et al.). Besides, they harm work ethics and team attitudes, which also directly negatively affect the medical institution’s performance. Evidence demonstrates that the lack of discipline of one employee leads to a further spread of reduced responsibility among the rest of the staff (Duffield et al.). This process is unacceptable for medical institutions.
Action
The main tasks of managing a medical institution are to ensure regulation of the intensity of the flow of patients to create a uniform load across departments and its distribution according to the types of care provided. At the same time, the key parameter affecting the coherence of the institution’s work is load uniformity. This also necessarily presupposes adequate provision of nursing staff levels. Maintaining and monitoring the performance of employees who meet ethical and administrative standards is essential. The late arrival of members of nursing teams to work leads to overloading the rest of the staff, as well as to numerous disruptions in the work of the medical institution. Based on the problem posed, the necessary actions are systematic monitoring of each employee’s working hours and the imposition of sanctions in case of failure to fulfill their duties.
Research in healthcare management shows that monitoring of delays leads to their decrease (Nishizaki et al.). In addition, daily meetings before the start of the work shift increase the assurance that the tracking of employees’ arrival in the workplace is performed as efficiently as possible in terms of ensuring an even and flexible distribution of workload (Griffiths et al.). In a situation where the nurse has to do the work for another staff member while maintaining her workload, it is necessary to compensate with monetary compensation or providing less work in the future (for example, an additional day off).
References
Carlesi, Katya Cuadros, et al. “Patient safety incidents and nursing workload.”Revista Latino-Americana de enfermagem 25 (2017). Web.
Duffield, Christine, et al. “Nursing staffing, nursing workload, the work environment and patient outcomes.” Applied nursing research 24.4 (2011): 244-255.
Griffiths, Peter, et al. “Nursing workload, nurse staffing methodologies and tools: A systematic scoping review and discussion.” International journal of nursing studies 103 (2020): 103487.
Nishizaki, Yuji, et al. “Relationship between nursing workloads and patient safety incidents.” Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare 3 (2010): 49.
Ross, Cheryl, Cath Rogers, and Christine King. “Safety culture and an invisible nursing workload.” Collegian 26.1 (2019): 1-7.