Developing a Shared Vision

The purpose of this proposal is to address the issues of staff shortages and poor job satisfaction rates resulting in turnover that our organization is facing at this time. We will discuss the impacts that these issues have within our department. And then, we will share and discuss ways that we as a team, can make an improvement on these issues in order to enable us to continue to provide quality health care for the patients we service daily. Impact

The impact that staff shortages can have is tremendous not only to the nursing staff, our patients, but also to our organization as a whole. Having a shortage of our nursing staff in our department can reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of care that we give to our patients due to the ratio of nurse to patient. This can include delay for any patient testing and or surgery, delay in a patient being discharged, which then promotes to bed shortages and patient complaints on the care they are receiving. In addition, it also hinders the early detection of patient complications, the safety of our patients and most importantly patient error due to lack of proper communication (American Association of Colleges of Nursing/Impact of the Nursing Shortage on Patient Care, n.d). The shortage of nursing staff then promotes to the issue of poor job satisfaction rates that then result in turnover among staff members. This occurs due to the added stress of caring for too many patients at one time and not having the time that it takes to communicate effectively among staff members for the well-being of the patient.

Improvements
In order to attempt to resolve the issues I propose that we as a team improve our communication, collaboration, and our teamwork. We must as a team improve cultural communication between patient and care givers so that patients know the exact options they have regarding their health care (Bhutani J, Bhutani S, Kumar J, 2013). While a patient is hospitalized they can see several different staff members in the length of their stay, therefore effective communication among staff members is of great importance. We can do so by keeping communication in regards to each patient in patient charts. We should detail anything and everything regarding the patient along with staff initials time and date of said entry. This will enable a team member to simply go into the patient chart and know what is going on with that particular patient.

Upon shift change review your patients with the staff coming on, communicating all directions, conditions, and instructions clearly. In order for us as a department to improve the turnover rate of our staff when we are already short is to create improved support services and work environments for our staff. One way of doing so is to provide nurses with a balanced workload. In order to do so I would like to have ideas from the staff of ways that we can reduce their workload. Perhaps hiring a CNA to help on every shift. I would also like to us to plan a company outing or shift luncheon to build on staff relationships. Working on ways to improve in these areas will allow us to operate more efficiently as a team and manage stress among staff members while providing quality patient care to our patients.

Conclusion
This proposal was to address the issues of staff shortages and poor job satisfaction rates resulting in turnover that our organization is facing. We have discussed the impacts that these issues have within our department. We also shared and discussed ways that we as a team, can make an improvement on these issues by fostering inclusion and improving communication and collaboration as a team in order to enable us to continue to provide quality health care for the patients we service daily.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing | Impact of the Nursing Shortage on Patient Care. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media-relations/nursing-shortage-resources/impact Bhutani J, Bhutani S, Kumar J. Achieving patient centered care:
Communication and cultural competence. Indian Journal Of Endocrinology & Metabolism. January 2013;17(1):187-188. Weiss, D., Tillen, F. J., & Morgan, M. J. (2014). The interprofessional health care team: Leadership and development. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning