Describe the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected and its impact on your organization. Use organizational data to quantify the impact (if necessary, seek assistance from leadership or appropriate stakeholders in your organization)

Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Sample Paper

National Healthcare Issue

The shortage of workforce in the health sector is one problem that continues to plague the United States. While Registered Nurses form the largest group of care providers in the country, their shortage persist as only about sixty percent practice in public hospitals. This shortage is projected to worsen further through 2022 with the current system of healthcare in the country (American Nurses Association, n.d.) owing to the anticipated retirement of the currently available workforce and advancing ages of baby boomers.

The quadruple aim has been promoted to improve the provisions of the tipple aim that advocated for improvement in population health, individual care experience, and healthcare cost reduction. The quadruple aim adds the improvement of healthcare provider’s experience as another objective to the triple aim (Valaitis et al., 2020).

In fact, Park et al. (2018) notes that it is possible to improve the providers’ experience by promoting the caregiver’s joy at work and providing meaning to their work experience. Therefore, the shortage of workforce can only prevent the achievement of the quadruple aim through enhancing nurse stress at the workplace.

Workplace stress will imminently worsen the already existing shortage of healthcare workforce. The increasing need for primary care due to the increasing prevalence of chronic disease necessitates balancing the nurse-to-patient ratio (Pittman & Scully-Russ, 2016). The inclusion of other strategies by other organizations has proved to be a great solution to the workforce shortage and workplace stress and emotional distress of nursing care providers.

Impact on My Practice Setting

My health organization is not spared by the low nurse-to-patient ratio. The recommended country average ratio of nurse to clients is 1:5 while in my organization, this ratio is lower in various departments. This has caused delayed shift reporting, increased medical errors, increased nurse fatigue, and deterioration in nurse’s mental health. While some nurses have transferred from the organization, others have increased their shift duration to cover for the shortage.

Workload stress has been evident through depression and anxiety among workers, workplace conflicts and incivility, and increased delegation of duties to other junior practitioners. Early retirement of some of the most experienced nurses has also been observed. This trend has also been encountered in nursing practice in some countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada (MacPhee, Dahinten, & Havaei, 2017). The ultimate consequences are compromised professional standards and constant depreciation in care quality.

Research Articles Review

Management of workload-related stress among nurses involves interventional strategies employed at the national, organizational, and personal levels. Herr et al. (2018) conducted a study on the long-term effectiveness of work stress management strategies employed among 101 male industrial workers. The study assessed the outcome of stress management on the subjects’ mental health and sleep quality at the end of the observation time.

The intervention focused mainly on alterations in reactivity to stressors at work, such as social conflicts, workload, work stress, and anticipatory reactivity. The study established that reduction in reactivity to social stress had long-term positive benefits on reduction of depression, anxiety, and sleep problems.

A study by Havermans et al. (2018), on the other hand, investigated the need for stress prevention strategies among employees and workplace supervisors in various organizational sectors such as finance, services industry, and health care. In this focused group discussion study, researchers guided 7 employees and 8 supervisors in expressing their experiences and opinion about their needs in work-related stress prevention. The emergent themes were analyzed and four main subthemes necessary to prevent stress in the workplace emerged, namely communication, social support, stakeholders’ involvement, and availability of preventive measures