Importance of Staffing in Enhancing Patient Care

Healthcare Management

First Student

A healthy population is often associated with a country's economic prosperity. As such, governments have often been in the forefront of supporting the healthcare sector through staffing and funding medical research. Patient safety is a vital component of quality nursing care. It has been shown that hospitals with low nurse staffing levels tend to have higher rates of poor patient outcomes such as shock, urinary tract infections, cardiac arrest, and pneumonia. This indicates that staffing levels often affect the quality of care accorded to patients. Proper staffing and physician levels can ensure the provision of quality health care in many ways.

First, it reduces the work overload. Groff and Terhaar (2010) posit that nurses are often dissatisfied with their work due to work-related stress such as staff shortages, tight work schedules, and poor-physician-nurse engagements. Therefore, employing adequate nursing staff and physician will reduce the ratio between the physician and the patients thus reducing the workload. In addition, increasing physician levels will also lead to quality in the sense that many physicians will exchange ideas and knowledge on how to treat a certain patient. This will in turn improve the quality of care accorded to patients. On the other hand, appropriate staffing and increasing physician levels will allow the staff draw from diverse disciplines to collaborate. This will in turn improve their work environment, thus improve the quality of care.

Staffing also entails empowering nursing staff to use technology. The use of numerous technologies such as telehealth technologies that entail combinations of audio, data, and video transmission through electronic communication will help to improve the quality of health care (Buckley et al., 2004). Enhancing the physician's quality reporting method and feedback program will also improve the quality of care provided to patients. In addition, staffing a health care center with qualified and techno-savvy staff will enable electronic patient communication and education possible (Weaver et al., 2012). As such, patients will receive quality care by communicating with medical practitioners using e-mail, electronic health records, and social media.