Clinical experience is a crucial step in the development of any nursing student yet it provides multiple opportunities for growth and development to experienced professionals as well. Clinical experience allows every nurse to improve their decision-making and cultivate competencies necessary for higher quality and efficiency of care. In addition, it allows becoming familiar with major challenges that interfere with better nurse performance. Through my practice, I have learned that inadequate nurse staffing is probably one of the most important of them.
The issue of nurse staffing has multiple legal and ethical implications. For example, the ethical principle of non-maleficence refers to “ensuring patients’ safety and preventing any injury or damage to them is a major priority for healthcare providers.” However, when hospitals have improper patient-to-nurse ratios, it becomes harder for practitioners to adhere to this principle. In such situations, they may involuntary neglect patient needs or take the wrong action due to physical and time constraints and excessive workloads. In some cases, inadequate staffing can result in medical errors leading to severe patient morbidity, and even death. When an adverse patient outcome is a result of negligence, the medical law prescribes to compensate him or her fairly. Therefore, the inability to maintain proper patient-to-nurse ratios increases the financial burden of hospitals. It is also worth noting that healthcare practitioners involved in medical errors often suffer multiple psychological problems, guilt, shame, a sense of inadequacy, and many other adverse emotions that lower their job satisfaction and overall functionality.
The findings of numerous studies have demonstrated a close link between nurse staffing and patient outcomes. For instance, the results of longitudinal research conducted by He, Staggs, Bergquist-Beringer, and Dunton reveals that an increase in advanced nurse staffing is positively correlated with a decrease in the rate of such adverse patient outcomes like falls and pressure ulcers. It means that adequate nurse staffing is necessary for creating a safe healthcare system and minimizing healthcare costs and that solutions based on research evidence must be developed and applied in all clinical settings.