A persistent shortage of nursing staff across the United States challenges the belief and values of this profession. Many nurses may find it difficult to carry out their ethical obligations to patients due to the insufficiency in staffing. Because of this shortage, many nurses complain that they experience emotional distress and job dissatisfaction and end up not providing quality care to their patients. Such nurses end up in an ethical dilemma, whereby they must choose between caring for their own welfare or the needs of their patients.
Poor Patient Care
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One ethical obligation nurses must fulfill during their daily duties involves ensuring they protect patients from any harm. However, due to staffing shortages, nurses find this challenging because the hospital where they work assigns them to care for several patients. In so doing, the hospital sets unrealistic goals, especially if these patients need specialized care due to terminal illnesses. For example, if a hospital assigns six cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy to a single nurse, the nurse might fail to adequately meet all the other patients’ needs. Chronically ill patients require holistic care and a lot of emotional support. Inappropriate staffing levels deny nurses a chance to provide proper patient care despite their training and experience. According to the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, this inadequate nursing shortage increases patient mortality because they fail to receive the necessary care during hospital stays.
Decrease in Job Satisfaction
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Ethics help nurses make the right decisions under the guidance of their morals. However, due to acute staffing shortages, nurses may feel constantly dissatisfied with their jobs. Most hospitals respond to the increasing patient demands by providing overtime pay for nurses. In so doing, the hospital emphasizes only the technical aspect of nursing care and forgets about the ethics of care, a personal value that most nurses cherish. Job dissatisfaction results from finding an inappropriate working environment whereby nurses lack the time to communicate with the patients and provide meaningful nursing care. According to the Journal of Nursing Ethics, many nurses view providing support to patients and comfort care as a vital aspect that reflects professional values and ethics.
Moral Distress
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Nurses working in health care settings with inadequate staff may suffer from moral distress because they feel that they compromise their ethical responsibility of protecting patients from harm by providing inadequate patient care. When hospitals assign several patients to a nurse, it also interferes with the principle of doing good to protect patients from harm. For instance, a nurse may decide to only give the basic mandatory care to a patient, such as injections or medicine, but lack the time to give them a back rub or take them out for a walk. In worse circ*mstances, nurses might end up making a medical error that leads to the death of a patient simply because the hospital overwhelms them with too many responsibilities. Such nurses may suffer from mental anguish because they believe that they would have provided better care to patients were it not for the multiple duties.
Burnout
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Constant ethical conflicts at work may lead to emotional stress and physical and mental burnout. Nurses working around the clock to attend to all the patients the hospital assigns to them suffer from physical exhaustion. In addition, they end up working overtime to cater to the rising patient demands while at the same time compromising the quality of nursing care. In the long run, such nurses suffer from physical exhaustion and mental distress and may consider quitting their profession.
Legal Implications
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The public is aware about the problem of understaffing and view it as a major fundamental issue in health care centers. According to plaintiff counsels, the public can readily access the data about the inadequate staffing levels in health care settings and use it to trigger lawsuits even in the absence of other systematic problems. For example, the Federal Office of Inspector General announced that it would treat failure of care resulting from inadequate nursing levels as grounds for criminal and civil prosecution using the Federal Civil False Claims Act. Moreover, in the past few years, health care facilities have continued to receive lawsuits relating to low staffing levels. Matters relating to these lawsuits touch on poor nursing care leading to injuries, bedsores, residents wandering and even death. In most of the cases, the jury awards large settlements to the victims’ families, making it an expensive affair for the health care providers.
