The worldwide shortage of nurses remains a significant problem in the field, forcing specialists to overwork themselves and put patients in danger. The healthcare industry in the United States is already experiencing difficulties in operation and pricing, and the nurse shortages decrease the efficiency of the system even further. The capstone project has outlined possible interventions and suggestions to this issue, and I aim to discuss those in this paper, alongside highlighting the importance of the problem overall.
At the moment, the number of nurses employed is insufficient for the healthcare providers to ensure adequate working conditions for nurses and timely and effective provision of services at the same time. In podiatry in particular the waiting lists tend to be especially long, severely affecting the welfare of the patients (Drennan & Ross, 2019). The potential intervention would be to provide the nurses with special training programmes, allowing them to improve their qualifications and learn to work with multiple patients at once.
The increase in competence would allow the nurses to work with more then one patient at once, addressing the negative effect the shortage has on the healthcare services. This suggestion lies in the heart of my capstone project, however after the conducted research I now also consider the potential of home healthcare training. Since the beginning of my research I have changed my focus, expanding it to incorporate training for settings other than hospitals. I believe that to train the nurses to work more effectively on groups of patients in different environments would help to address the problem of inefficiency and long waiting times. The welfare of the patient should always be a medic’s top priority, and this intervention would undoubtedly benefit it.
Reference
Drennan, V. M., & Ross, F. (2019). Global nurse shortages: The facts, the impact and action for change. British Medical Bulletin, 130(1), 25-37.