For a country or state to achieve their goal in e health care system where every individual receives optimum health care then more nurses need to be employed. In most instances nurses tend to be under paid and their roles in the health sector under looked. The reason why nurses are highly needed in this area is the fact that it the patients or rather senior need care which is best given by the nurses. Besides the low qualification such scenarios lead to over working of the real nurses causing burnout. In this blog the impacts of the nurses to patient ratio are clearly discussed.
To start with one of the ways in which nurse to patient ratio affect seniors is over working of the nurses. Burn out is generally the state at which one is physically, mentally and psychologically depleted. Long hours of working may lead to dire consequence the nurses may be tired both physically and mentally in this situation they may even tend to confuse care to be given between thee residents especially medication. Long working hours may force the nurses to abandon the patients for a little bit of their rest.
The second way in which seniors are impacted by the low nurse to patient ratio is frequent resignation of qualified nurses. For one to trust a care giver or nurse they ought to have seen them around and known them quite well, however this is not the case as most nurses move from one nursing home to another looking for better working environments. When nurses turnover is high then the of the residential home suffer from receiving substandard services and in other cases to care is given to them at all un till a new nurse is found.
The third way in which nurse to patient ratio affect the seniors is by receiving care from unqualified staff. In cases where the number of nurses and other care givers is low the patients may end up being unattended due to the heavy burden imposed on the nurses. The unqualified staff may tend to take act which may have more consequences and harm on the patients institutions and their career as the family members may tend to go to court for justice.
Finally, another impact of the nurse to patient ratio is creation of wrong mentality about the nursing career. Many people tend to choose other career due to the notion that nursing is not well paying. Instead of taking their seniors to public residential home or rather government or state owned homes some may prefer to care for them from home and this may not be very advisable. The poor care given to the senior in the residential homes highly discourages the urge for one to grow old.