NURS 6053 Week 3 Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Example 2 Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Different competing needs arise in healthcare organizations as the organization strives to meet its goals and targets while maintaining high-quality patient care using the available workforce and resources. Organizational policies and practices are developed to address the competing needs and guide the actions taken towards addressing the competing needs. The selected national healthcare issue/stressor is the nursing/physician shortage. This essay describes two competing issues impacting the nursing/physician shortage issue, a relevant policy or practice in my organization that may impact the issue, presents a critique of the selected policy, and recommends a policy or practice change that can balance the competing needs while addressing the ethical shortcomings of the existing policies.

The competing needs impacting the nursing and physician shortage issue include optimizing the institutional budget, maintaining optimum quality of patient care services, and maximizing profits in the institution. The need to optimize the set budget in an institution considerably impacts the need to address the nursing/physician shortage issue, since the available budget determines the number of employees. Nurses and physicians are among the most vital members of the healthcare workforce and significantly influence patient care services and outcomes.

According to Cho et al. (2020), a huge relationship exists between the nursing/physician shortage and the quality of care in an institution. The need to maintain good care quality impacts the need to address staff shortages. In addition, the need to maximize profits influences the actions taken to address the nursing/physician shortage issue. There is a need to determine the number of nurses/physicians that should be employed to address the issue and remain within the budget to maximize profit.

One of the policies in my institution that influence the nursing/physician shortage is the institutional recruitment and hiring policy. The policy outlines the institution’s procedure and guidelines for onboarding new staff. Shubek et al. (2020) note that hiring/recruitment policies entail the purpose of hiring and recruitment and the recruitment, selection and onboarding processes specific to an institution. The institutional hiring and recruitment policy influences the nursing/physician shortage in the organization by attracting and retaining qualified nurses and physicians through a streamlined recruitment process and encouraging internal talent promotion and advancement.

An institutional hiring and recruitment policy’s ethical considerations include privacy, non-discrimination, inclusion, equal opportunity, and transparency (Harris et al., 2021). Similarly, the policy in my organization has put in place strategies to ensure the employees’ privacy and non-discrimination, inclusion, fairness, transparency and equal opportunities throughout the processes. The policy’s strengths in promoting ethics include having a diverse recruitment team, thus preventing discrimination and bias, having a confidential system for conducting background checks and enhancing privacy. However, a major challenge in promoting ethics through the policy is the lack of a strategy to avoid conflicts of interest when hiring persons with personal or professional relationships with the recruitment team members.

One of the policy changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients while addressing ethical shortcomings of the existing policies is the change to comply with labor laws. Compliance with labor laws enables an institution to provide a fair working environment for the staff, thus enhancing patient care while addressing ethical issues such as unfairness (Earnshaw et al., 2020). For instance, compliance with labor laws dictates the development of favorable shifts, which encourages staff to provide appropriate care while avoiding issues such as high workloads and low wages. Cho et al. (2020) also support regulatory compliance as a policy change to enhance care quality while addressing ethical issues in existing policies.

The above-identified competing needs influence the actions to address an institution’s nursing/physician shortage issue. The hiring and recruitment policy also impacts the nursing and physician shortage by streamlining the related policies. Ethical considerations should be maintained while developing policies and practices to balance competing needs.

References

Cho, S. H., Lee, J. Y., You, S. J., Song, K. J., & Hong, K. J. (2020). Nurse staffing, nurse prioritization, missed care, quality of nursing care, and nurse outcomes. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 26(1), e12803. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijn.12803