Nursing Shortage: Inability to Gain Control in Healthcare

Description of the Topic

It seems that the question of a nursing shortage has not been discussed for a long period. People understand their needs, know their abilities, and realize how crucial the healthcare sphere can be. It is necessary to educate people and train qualified staff to make sure that all services are of high quality. However, the investigations show that the concept of a nursing shortage is still urgent today, and nurses face several problems like the inabilities to earn a living and the development of a feeling of undervaluation. Even the presence of expanded opportunities for nurses (“America’s Nursing Shortage” 13) can become a problem and influence the question of a nursing shortage considerably.

A nursing shortage means that the demand for professional nurses is higher than the supply. Developed, as well as developing countries, may suffer from a nursing shortage nowadays. Sometimes, nurses are ready to change their work because of low salaries or the possibility to achieve higher goals. Sometimes, nurses are not satisfied with the conditions under which they have to work such as stresses, losses, people’s problems, the necessity to help and understand all the time, inability to refuse someone’s requests, etc. Though such challenges seem to be small, they do present and define the quality of nursing care offered. The working environment of nurses defines the quality of patient care offered (Needleman 5). When nurses decide to leave or change their jobs, hospitals and medical centers face a challenge to find an appropriate substitution and make sure all services can be offered on the expected high level.

It is very important to educate more nurses. However, to present a high supply of nurses it is necessary to overcome such challenges like a gender question (not all male students are eager to work as nurses because this job is usually defined as feminine) or the awareness of low salaries (students do not want to pay for education and know that they can hardly earn much to pick up the losses).

Importance of the Topic

The inability to solve the problem of a nursing shortage creates many challenges in different spheres of life. For example, a nursing shortage may be caused by the fact that many nurses have to address food banks or payday lenders to survive and meet the ends (Mulholland par.1). People know such facts and cannot understand why they have to devote their lives to work that is not beneficial from a financial point of view. That is why the government must analyze the current situation and make improvements that can show that nursing is the sphere with benefits. People should be eager to become nurses.

As soon as nurses like their jobs and enjoy their duties, the quality of healthcare services can be improved considerably. As soon as the quality of services is improved, people start paying more attention to their health and enjoy the opportunities they get as patients. Even though nurses are not regarded as professional doctors, who can make diagnoses and prescriptions, the role of nurses in hospitals is crucial. It is hard to imagine a hospital without a nurse. It is impossible to provide a patient with medical help without a nurse. Unfortunately, the current issue of a nursing shortage proves that society suffers from the inability to have as many nurses as possible.

Works Cited

“America’s Nursing Shortage: It’s Real, and It’s Back.” USR Healthcare 2015. Web.

Mulholland, Helene. “Nursing Chief: Nurse Shortages Are Life-Threatening.” The Guardian. 2015. Web.

Needleman, Jack. “Nurse Staffing: The Knows and Unknowns.” Nursing Economics 33.1 (2015): 5-7. Print.