Does Low Nurse Workload Increase Patient Satisfaction

This simply translates to creating conditions that favor prevention of harmful conditions from affecting a patient throughout the whole healthcare process. It can also be defined as the effort aimed at averting the negative results during the process of healthcare. While great strides have been made all over the world to improve healthcare, the problem of nurse workload has not really been addressed. Nurse workload refers to the professional duty given to a nurse at any given time. The measures of nurse workload are mainly nurse to patient ratio and the working hours of nurses. The response rate was 22. The results obtained showed that nurse workload negatively affected patient safety outcome, therefore, increasing the morbidity rate. A higher nurse to patients' ratio was associated with all the three morbidity outcomes studies.

The results indicated a higher probability of patient morbidity as a result of patient falls and medication errors. Sure enough, the nurses with the higher volume of work throughout the week reported more cases of complications among their patients compared to the nurses with few cases of a heavy volume of work. A total of 78 673 nurses from the Taiwan Province Union of Nurses Associations were used as respondents in carrying out the study. The research was carried out over a period of two weeks and the response rate was 90. 5% (Liu et al. In the study, the effect of nurse workload on patient safety outcome was studied with interests in patient falls, conceptual, errors in medication, failure to rescue the patients in critical conditions, hospital-acquired UTI, ulcers, missing medications hospital-acquired pneumonia, and extubation.

According to the findings of the research, there were 41 cases of patient falls out of the total 12,895 valid shift records. From the findings, it is evident that higher workload as a result of working overtime causes physiological effects such as fatigue among the nurses which reduces their net effective output therefore compromising the quality of healthcare services. Furthermore, the many patients attached to few nurses means that nurses have to work for more hours to cater to the needs of the patients. The result is that the risk of errors in handling the patients is increased as the nurses are just but human. The relationship between high workload and patient safety is therefore not one that works for the good of patients.

Another explanation to the high nurse workload in many medical institutions is that many countries face shortage of nurses. The study was done specifically by the authors to study the relationship between nurse workload and patient safety outcome. The article is also reliable as it used nurse-sensitive patient safety outcome indicators such as patient fall obtained from a previous study to come up with the relationship between nurse workload and the impact on patients. Response used for the study was partly obtained from the patients. This made the results obtained reliable as they reflected the actual happenings and impact of nurse workload on quality of healthcare. The other group of respondents included the nurses. Besides, the validity of the content used in the article was ascertained by six experts who were all presidents of associations of nurses in the county or city.

The experts had over fifteen years of experience in practice of nursing with five of them having a masters' degree and one a doctoral degree. Before beginning the study, a pilot test was carried out on all items in the logbook with the help of thirty nurses. The approach used for filling in data in the logbooks was the daily end of shift method where the information was filled anonymously into the logbook therefore further providing the validity of the article (Liu et al. In looking at the Liu et al. This ensured that the data collected represented the situation throughout the country and not just a specific section of the country. Consequently, the study in Liu et al. article was not biased.

A weakness in the article is the use of cross-sectional data in the study which limited casual; inferences (Liu et al. , 2012) In the website PSNet, Patient Safety Network authored by the role of nurses in the life of a patient is discussed as a critical one in ensuring the safety of a patient. Such legislation should be enacted throughout the world to avoid the issue of nurse workload that reduces the quality of healthcare. Therefore, the quality of healthcare directly depends on the nurse workload which is influenced by the patients to nurse ratio, working conditions of the nurses and the turnover in medical institutions. ("Nursing and Patient Safety | AHRQ Patient Safety Network," 2017) In the article, 4 ways to improve the nursing environment, patient safety, the significance of nurse workload is further stated as one of the ways of improving the nursing environment in attempts to better the healthcare services offered in medical institutions.

The role of nurses in ensuring patient safety is very important. As such, more staffing needs to be done to ensure that all the healthcare institutions are well equipped, not only with medical implements, but also an adequate number of nurses to attend to patients. Large patients-nurse ratios and more working hours translate to high workload which negatively affects the quality of services offered by nurses. It is strongly recommended that legislation should be enacted to regulate the nurse workload by dictating on the maximum number of patients assigned to each nurse at any given time and defining the maximum number of working hours for any particular nurse. These would go a long way in reducing nurse workload and therefore improve the quality of healthcare services offered by the nurses.