Table of Contents
Critical Information
Unemployment rates have been going up the past couple years, and people are not happy with their jobs or how much they make. Some people are only in it for the money, while others want a good paying job that makes them happy and allows them to do what they love. My dream job is nursing which I know is hard to get into, and it is hard to complete a bachelor’s degree of science in nursing. However, there will always be job opportunities in nursing. The nursing shortage is not a matter of decreasing supply, but the increase of demand for nurses. The lack of adequate nurses is affecting patient safety and causing medical mistakes to increase, which means more opportunities in the nursing field have opened up.
There is a serious shortage of registered nurses which is forcing thousands of hospitals to function with a skeleton crew, possibly causing thousands of unnecessary deaths and injuries. The shortage in 2001 was 126,000 and by 2020 the shortage will surge to 808,000 if something isn’t done about it. Nursing shortages have occurred throughout history. The need for nurses started during the Crimean War where “England had few nurses to care for its wounded, and many died due to unsanitary, dismal conditions in British field hospitals” (Hansen).
The more nurses there are the less likely people are going to die from different kinds of things. In the United States, the Civil War highlighted the need for skilled nurses and how important it really is to have lots of nurses and not just a few to take care of hundreds of patients. Every year the need for nurses’ increases, and this need affects patient safety and medical mistakes are being made because people aren’t properly trained since hospitals desperately need nurses.
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Medical errors kill more people than AIDS, breast cancer or car crashes every year. Hospitals say that encouraging doctors to admit their mistakes could help hospitals prevent future errors. In the 1970s, a malpractice suit raised the question of whether the cause was improved lawyering or declining doctoring. A large-scale study sampled over 20,000 medical charts from 23 California hospitals in 1974. It concluded that one out of twenty patients were harmed by treatment. “On a nationwide basis, the California study suggested hospital care produced 121,000 deaths every year” (Glazer). This means that if the statistic is right, then that medical treatment was killing twice as many Americans in a single year as died in the Vietnam War. Medical errors affect the patient’s safety and need to be monitored and resolved.
More than twelve years have passed since the government reported on preventing patient death. The government poured money into research and training, yet there are still high numbers of death and injury from medical errors. The health care industry and the government are still struggling to figure out how to tackle these problems. Things like “bloodstream infections caused by contaminated catheters are among the most dangerous threats, and hospitals are taking strong steps to prevent them” (Mantel).
There are other kinds of things that are contaminated and patients’ involvement in safety procedures would help. There was an orthopedist who was treating a carpal tunnel syndrome patient in the left wrist who performed the wrong surgery on her. He took action for his mistake and immediately notified the operating staff and then the hospital administrators and asked the patient if she wanted him to perform the correct surgery. She did, and he completed the operation without complication.
However, who knows what would have happened if he wouldn’t have realized his mistake. There were not enough nurses around in the hospital to help him do rounds and checkup to make sure he was doing the right procedure and body part. People need to make sure and double check what kind of surgery doctors are performing and on which part of the body, because doctors don’t want to pick the wrong wrist or leg. There are tens of thousands of medical mistakes each year and some are little things, but then some that are life threatening. Doctors and nurses need to start double checking before starting a surgery so fewer medical mistakes are made.
There are more and more vacancies in nursing and there always will be if nothing gets done. There are more than two-hundred-fifty job descriptions for health personnel. “The number and complexity of job titles is confusing both to patients and students preparing for positions in the health care field” (Frederickson 19). Some job titles often vary geographically which causes more confusion. Like the different kinds of nurses titles for delivering and taking care of a baby when its born. Some nursing career jobs are: nurse practitioner, registered nurse, trauma nurse, neonatal nurse, psychiatric-mental health practitioner, and geriatric nurse.
There are health care teams who are composed of a variety of personnel depending on the setting, the needs of patients, and the financial resources of the team members. In a hospital, “a typical health care might consist of a professional nurse, physician, physical therapist, occupational therapist, dietitian, social worker, and pharmacist” (Frederickson 20-22). Each member of the health care team has their own specific job and contributes specific knowledge and skills to patient care.
No matter what happens, there is always going to be a need for nurses. These shortages put patient safety at risk and medical mistakes are happening a lot because people aren’t properly trained. This is why hospitals near us have been changing to only Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree and not Registered Nurse which is an associate’s degree. The interest in nursing has been decreasing throughout the years because people want to become doctors. The need for nurses continues to grow because health care is one of the top career fields in the U.S. economy. The one “million registered nurses employed by hospitals in 1984 represented a twenty percent increase over the number employed in 1980” (“What is Causing the Nurse Shortage?”). This may not seem like a big percentage, but it makes a big impact when it comes to nursing and our society still needs more nurses every day.
