How to Determine Safe Inpatient Ward Staffing Levels - Essay Example

The problem is equally relevant for nurses and the facilities for which they work. Today, when patients require quality medical care and health care facilities face a growing degree of competition in health care markets, safe staffing turns out to be the key to health care facilities’ business success. As a result, the time has come when a new methodology for determining safe staffing levels for inpatient wards must be determined, be used by clinical and managerial personnel. On May 12, 2010, nearly one thousand registered nurses “rallied outside the US Capitol in support of legislation that would set adequate ratios of nurse-to-patient staffing in the nation’s hospitals to good care and prevent nurse burnout” (Lowes 2010).

The problem of nurse burnout, however, is not limited to the United States: hospitals all over the world face the growing need to develop and use a single, relevant, and universal method of determining optimal safe staffing levels for inpatient wards, to be able to meet the most sophisticated patient needs and to avoid nurse overloads. For example, hospitals in the U.K. face a lack of nurses (Cook, Render & Woods 2000). In Australia, safe staffing levels in medical facilities remain the topic of major public and professional concern (Dunn & Schmitz 2005).

In Pakistan, high rates of nurses’ turnover and frequent transfers produce serious negative effects on the quality of medical and health care (Jokhio, Pappas & Lancashire 2008). Obviously, hospitals need some new methods of determining optimal staffing ratios. Past years have been marked with the growing commitment toward various methods of determining optimal staffing ratios. Population ratios were the most popular means of calculating safe staffing levels in medical facilities (Hernandez, Fottler & Jointer 1998).

However, neither population ratios nor staffing schedules could resolve all HR and care issues in medical facilities; many of them were overstaffed while others lack appropriate nursing staff (Musau, Nyongesa & Kirui 2008).