This paper discusses legislatively mandated patient nurse ratios. Such ratios are beneficial to both patients and nurses and should become law. Patients receive more attention from nurses. Nurses on the other hand will benefit because they will have less stress in their jobs and will be less overwhelmed while working with their patients.
Legislatively Mandated Staffing Ratios
In the nursing profession, the first job is to care for patients and that is both their physical and mental pain. The job of a nurse is to heal and care for individuals in their times of most vulnerability, when they are at their physically weakest position. Nurses and other medical professionals are tasked with taking care of their patients, of healing the body and the mind, and of saving the lives of their patients. They are life givers and life savers, often the last hope for a person's survival. Every day, nurses and doctors have to go to work knowing that they will witness some sort of despair and trauma. A nurse must be both compassionate and competent. They must feel for the patient, but they must also remain emotionally distant enough that they can still do their job accurately and efficiently, otherwise the staff metaphorically bleeds for everyone who is physically doing so. It is both the most rewarding and most challenging job in the world. There has been a degree of debate as to what is the best way in which a nurse can do his or her job and one of the factors that contributes to the success or failure of treatment is the ratio of nurses to patients within the hospital setting. Restricting the number of patients each nurse cares for within a given period is good for both patient care and those in the nursing profession.
Patients need to be taken care of both in their physical illnesses or injuries and in their mental health as well. The nurses, as opposed to doctors, will have more prolonged direct contact with their patients. Nurses are responsible for initial care in the emergency rooms and for first contact when a patient enters a doctor's office for an appointment. The nurses take the vital signs of the patients and make an initial determination of what might be the situation but leave the actual diagnosis to the doctor. Once the doctor sees the patient, the nurses will be responsible for any other care that the patients require such as organizing further appointments and contacting other medical departments. If a patient is checked into the hospital, then it will be the nurse's job to feed patients, to give them medicine, to check on how they are doing and whether or not they are comfortable. Because of this intimate contact, patients will often feel closer to their nurse than their doctor.
By restricting the ratio of nurses to patients, it will ensure that the nurse's can forge a closer relationship of sorts with their patients. The fewer patients that a nurse has in her care, the more time that they can give to the attention of individual patients. Researchers have proven that the more comfortable a patient feels with the nurse who is providing them care, the higher the likelihood of a successful recovery (Wanzer 2004). In situations with a higher ratio of patients to nurses, there will inevitably be less time that the nurses can give to each patient, leading to a myriad of problems including potential misdiagnosis or neglect in some other way. When a nurse has little time for his or her patients then complications might arise which are then overlooked. Having too many patients can actually imperil the patients lives unless the emergency is caught and an alarm raised.
The experiences that a person has in regard to their medical treatment will largely impact their health for the rest of their life. The psychological state of the patients in medical treatment will largely determine the speed of recovery, or if the patients recovers at all from their trauma (Lupton 2009). Psychology of patients has been proven to be directly linked to whether or not patients get well and how fast they are able to recover from illness or injury. Researchers argue that if a person has positive experiences when they are ill or injured then they will feel more comfortable the next time that they have other problems with their health (Hale & Grogan 2010). On the other hand, people who have had negative experiences in their pasts with healthcare professionals, the less likely they will be to seek out medical aid in the future, often leading to medical complications which can worsen the likelihood of recovery from an illness or injury. Healthy communication between patients and nurses is necessary for the full recovery of patients.
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