NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2 Needs Analysis for Change

Needs Analysis for Change

Staffing shortages impact patient outcomes, staffing stability, and health care organization financial outcomes. Nurses are overworked; patient safety and nurse burnout are at risk; and there are no staffing shortages. A few health care organizations may discover that temporary employees, over time, can fulfill their staffing needs, which can lead to higher financial costs. The lack of adequate nurse staffing in the health care environment was also identified as being associated with poor health care outcomes, including medication errors, infections, falls, and death. The economic and Clinical impact of a nursing shortage and the cost of optimising the use of strategies and plans to ensure workforce retention to deliver high-quality and safe nursing care.

Summarizing the Chosen Economic Issue and Its Impact 

Shortage of nursing staff is a problem for the nurse, patient, and health care organisations. As the size of the patient population increases, the nurse has to carry out more of their duties, and at the same time, the nurse might be feeling physically tired, mentally stressed, and unhappy with their job, as this will affect the quality of nursing they provide for their patients (Abdulai et al., 2025). The risk of wrong staffing can lead to the health care worker being overwhelmed, injuries to patients, and significant overtime.

Impacts on Colleges and Organizations

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the current nursing shortage has a negative effect on my experience in a lot of ways. Foremost, it has led to the allocation of a large number of patients to nurses on a daily basis and added work for the nurses. It is common for there to be high numbers of patients, which can lead to high levels of stress,

 fatigue and emotional exhaustion for nurses. Further, staff engagement issues have also contributed to poor inter- and intra-team communications and collaboration, which may impact the appropriate level of staffing to provide the level of care a patient requires. These factors can also impact staff morale and satisfaction, which may result in reduced access to health care services if the health care system is not sufficiently resourced and/or staffed to provide services to the community.

Rationale for Pursuing the Issue

Two challenges, which have a direct impact on the patient’s care, workforce instability, and healthcare organizations’ financial performance, that demand urgent action are the current nursing shortages and high labour costs. Nursing turnover continues to be a problem for health systems, which incurs an extra expense in recruiting and training a new nurse, and continues to place a burden on other nurses. Moreover, the increasing workload for the nurses, due to greater access to care and longer waiting times, is also associated with the nursing staff shortage, particularly in facilities looking after vulnerable residents. All of these trends point to the need to prioritize workforce planning for healthcare organizations, along with designing effective retention strategies that will continue to deliver adequate numbers of nursing staff to patients, as well as high-quality and affordable health care services for patients.

Existing Gap in the Issue

Increased demand for health care coupled with a decreasing number of Registered Nurses (RN’s) is one of the primary reasons for the national shortage of RNs, and the growing number of patients in need of nursing care in health care facilities is another reason. The rising population of patients receiving nursing care services can be attributed to increased longevity, a high number of older adults, and a high prevalence of chronic diseases within the population.

In addition, RN shortages and challenges with highly qualified nurses’ retention and recruitment within health care organizations continue to create a nursing labour pool scarcity and drive up the cost of nursing care. In order to solve this problem, it is essential to have long-term workforce planning, an appropriate retention strategy, ongoing investment in nursing education, a stable nursing workforce, and providing a high level of quality care to patients.

Identification of Disparity

Fewer nurses or nursing staff combined with the rising costs of recruiting new staff have led to healthcare service access inequalities and an increased impact on different populations, those who are low-income, rural, or ethnically diverse. Worse, these populations are also underserved by the amount of supplies they have, as well as qualified healthcare providers, which makes it difficult to provide healthcare services. Together, these two have caused people to be denied access to health care, and during the pandemic, to an overburdened health care system. This results in a less ‘continuous’ trajectory in the care continuum, and for those who are very ill, not enough staff to provide care is available, resulting in longer waiting times for health services for these people. Each of these can have a detrimental effect on individuals’ health, and contribute to the existing inequities in health.

Limited or no access to nursing services will affect a population in terms of chronic disease and availability of resources or transportation to get to a nursing services provider. Most of these minority by race/ethnicity, and they are still faced with inequities in access to health care. In these communities, there are a number of organisations with limited resources to recruit or hire a nurse. A key part of finding a solution to the nursing shortage is the creation and dissemination of a nursing workforce placement and staffing policy tackling inequality and improving access to quality nursing services.

Finding Peer-Reviewed Sources

Fewer nurses are involved in providing patient care, a key contributing factor to labor shortages that are impacting labor costs and patient safety of health care services. This has resulted in more clinical incidents (falls, medication administration, etc.), and thus each nurse needs to share these tasks amongst themselves and with a small number of nurses. In the literature searched, it can be observed that hospitals that have a low nurse staffing level are found to be associated with more adverse event patient safety issues than hospitals that have a high nurse staffing level, as shown by Peng et al. 2023. The results show that under-resourcing is a cause of inefficiency, and low levels of patient safety have an impact on basic needs.

Numerous other large health systems have similarly educated nurses providing nursing care that delivers favorable health outcomes. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has put together a series of recommendations for optimal nurse staffing to help reduce the risk of adverse medical outcomes, while also helping to improve the overall quality of health care service delivery. Another major threat to higher mortality rates in hospitals mentioned by The Joint Commission is inadequate nurse staffing. The results from this study show that an increase in the nurses-patient ratio also increases the risk of death of the patient by 7% (for every 1% increase in the rating). Hence, the present results suggest that there should be a need for 

Predicted Outcomes and Growth Opportunity

Using nursing workforce optimization to reduce nursing shortages and increasing costs can have a multitude of favorable outcomes which will benefit both the patients receiving nursing care as well as the nursing staff offering that nursing care. Some of these outcomes are: Improving quality of care, decreasing the number of patients harmed by greater workload and stress during shifts, which leads to increased patient safety

. There is also a correlation between patient care and staffing intensity, which will eventually result in lower resource use, shorter length of stay (LOS) for patients, and better performance for many other indicators. The results will contain more efficient clinical outcomes at lower cost of care after optimizing the “how health care gets delivered” process with the new nurses added to the health care delivery system.

In addition, nurse-to-patient ratios have been found to be a measure of an organization’s overall performance in relation to the larger health care system, which, in turn, can influence its performance in the areas of patient care and patient satisfaction. If nurses’ and other staff’s workloads are distributed equally, there will be more opportunities for them to communicate with each other, which is a vital part of the care they are able to provide for patients. This in turn will lead to better co-ordination of patient care and a better patient experience. Incorporation of extra space will make any institution more efficient in terms of work output, patient experience, and increased profits. All of these changes could significantly improve the confidence consumers have in the health care system, and the viability and success of hospitals and other institutions in the long run.

Cost Benefits for Patients and the Organization

Excessive shortage of nurses with excess costs to the nurse disproportionately impact healthcare organizations’ economic and productivity impacts. Higher rates of nurse staffing are associated with higher costs of care related to increased lengths of stay, greater risk of bad care for patients, and the inefficient use of health care resources, which adds costs to care. Problems come in a variety of forms, including restricted budgets and insufficient productivity of the system. The right people are in place, all procedures can be optimized, and no effort will be lost; no time will be wasted in providing the correct services to the patients and in processing patient treatment and billing to the various healthcare organisations, which would generate additional revenue. Overall, improved workforce planning and management lead to improved quality of patient care, fiscal health, and sustainability of health care systems.

Conclusion

Finally, these have an impact on caring, the effectiveness of staff, and the sustainability of the health care institution, and these should be taken into account when addressing the nursing shortage and high labour costs. Staffing measures that enhance the quality of the services provided, such as continuing staff training, learning, and patient-centered care, can form part of a good solution. However, there are wider benefits for health care systems implementing retention policies and workforce planning: they can become more efficient and minimise staff turnover to provide communities with timely and safe health care services.