Understaffing in Emergency Rooms

The emergency department is very important in the delivery of quality care and safety of the patients. However, the department experiences issues in the delivery of care that affects its efficiency in many health facilities, including my working area. Among those issues is understaffing, which is contributed by high nurse turnover and poor working environment. Nurse understaffing in the emergency room means that the nurses available have to work three times the number of patients they should be handling (Ramsey et al., 2018). Nurses are hence exhausted, burnout, and have low job satisfaction and performance. The problem exposes the patients to adverse effects like injuries, hospital-acquired infections, misdiagnosis, identification errors, and sometimes death due to unintentional negligence (Ramsey et al., 2018). 

The principles of guiding quality improvement include the implementation of a communication program that will enhance teamwork and communication of problems within and across the departments and improvement of the work environment to foster social change and job satisfaction (Houser, 2016). The implementation of these two principles will enhance the reputation of the facility and attract more qualified nurses.

Qualitative or mixed methods research findings can be used to understand the nurses’ experience in the emergency room, especially during a short-staffed period and also measure the extent to which short staffing and attitudes of the nurses affect the outcomes of the patients. Using the relationship developed in mixed methods research, one can predict the best patient to nurse ratio that could foster positive patient outcomes.

The mixed methods research technique fits the identified issues, as the objective is not only to assess whether understaffing is affecting the department but also to determine the magnitude of the impact and provide a solution that could improve the situation. 

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References

Houser, J. (2016). Nursing research: Reading, using and creating evidence. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Ramsey, Z., Palter, J. S., Hardwick, J., Moskoff, J., Christian, E. L., & Bailitz, J. (2018). Decreased nursing staffing adversely affects emergency department throughput metrics — Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, 19(3), 496.