Introduction
Nurses serving in health care facilities are obliged the provision treatment and care services for several patients admitted and those who seek outpatient services. However, due to the greatest acuity level, the number of nurses performing such services has substantially decreased across the US (Tawfik et al., 2020). When a nurse practitioner reports that he or she is not feeling well or goes on a leave, it is certain that the chief nursing officer will be left with no option apart from allocating a care giver to every patient. Therefore, the role of the chief nursing officer involves allocation of each patient a caregiver and gets compelled to double them up with the patients they have been allocated to care for other patients. Few patients keep caregivers occupied in care facilities, so patient treatment attempts get greater focus.
With such occurrences, nurses offering care services to patients have been affected in one way or another owing to the pressures and increased workloads that have caused burnout among other health concerns. In addition, the intense workloads have subjected care providers to dangers such as back pains among other injuries due to unfavorable working environments, long working hours, and improper body mechanics (Fagerström et al., 2018). To lessen nurse stress while coworkers are sick or on leave, nurse-patient ratio must be addressed. Ensuring adequate nursing staffing reduces mortality, prevents infections, and improves patient and nurse satisfaction. The evaluation is going to address the issue of understaffing in nurses working in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). It will focus on how understaffing can be addressed, and demonstrate how aspects such as increased nursing errors can be eliminated using the PICOT question.
PICOT Question: Does having enough nurses on staff in the ICU (I) in comparison to not having enough nurses on staff (C) (O) decrease medical errors and infections among patients and stress and disorders among nurses (O) within a year (T)?
- Population(P)- patients in ICU.
- Intervention(I)- enough staff nurses
- Comparison(C)- not having enough nurses on staff
- Outcome (O)- decrease medical errors and infections among patients and stress and disorders among nurses
- Time(T)- within a year.
The assessment study will dwell on the issue of a reduced nurse staff in the ICU, which has increased the number of medical errors. This leads to increased dangers among patients, which translates to escalated cases of preventable mortalities due to delays, stress, disorders, and infections. The study will also be guided by two articles, seeking their stands on the problem, and how they address it while exhausting their relationship with the PICOT question.
Ethical Considerations of the Research
Research ethics are a set of guidelines that should be taken into consideration when planning and carrying out experiments. Voluntary participation, informed consent, anonymity, confidentiality, risk of harm, and dissemination of findings are all part of these guiding principles (Nogueira et al., 2017). Like any other ordinary research, it is certain that the study was highly considerate of ethical elements, which have been guiding all the designs and practices. Therefore, the two studies were conducted after seeking the informed consent of the participants as well as having voluntary participation from the subjects rather than forcing them to participate.
Conclusion
In summary, extremities reported on the gaps between patient outcomes and nursing staffing levels have increased risks and dangers for patients seeking intensive care services. Therefore, there is more need to intensify the actual patient-nurse ratio to eradicate the potency of such discrepancy, hence, improving patient outcomes. In addition, it is certain that anytime recruitment of nurses is sought, consideration of the number of hours of care required by patients should be prioritized.
References
Fagerström, L., Kinnunen, M., & Saarela, J. (2018). Nursing workload, patient safety incidents and mortality: an observational study from Finland. BMJ Open, 8(4), e016367. Web.
Nogueira, T. D. A., Menegueti, M. G., Perdoná, G. D. S. C., Auxiliadora-Martins, M., Fugulin, F. M. T., & Laus, A. M. (2017). Effect of nursing care hours on the outcomes of Intensive Care assistance. PloS One, 12(11), e0188241. Web.
Tawfik, D. S., Profit, J., Lake, E. T., Liu, J. B., Sanders, L. M., & Phibbs, C. S. (2020). Development and use of an adjusted nurse staffing metric in the neonatal intensive care unit. Health Services Research, 55(2), 190-200. Web.