Nurses are the essential service providers in the hospital. To achieve its mission, vision and strategic goals, the healthcare workforce relies on nurses to provide patient care, update patient records, and ensure efficient and holistic delivery of medical care. They are equally charged with delivering culturally competent care and facilitating physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing of the patients (Fiorio, Gorli & Verzillo, 2018). Therefore, nurses remain an integral component of the workforce culture now and in the future. The workforce strategic plan is covered under its vision statement, to grow into a provider of choice, invest in people by hiring and retaining highly talented and motivated workforce, ensuring safety and wellbeing of patients and communities, and delivering quality, cost effective and satisfactory healthcare service. As nurses implement various care concepts into their daily practice based on their training and education, they effectively manage to implement culturally proficient care.
With lesser education and awareness in the healthcare department, there are fewer nurses being enrolled into nursing programs and being trained to become competent nurses ready to work. Development of the educational system is key to ensuring the availability of patient-centered, safe, and secure primary care provided by current and prospective nurses. Proper education is crucial to ensure that students reach high standards of schooling through a successful curriculum and efficient methods of studying. Nursing has multiple paths in education and is among the most prominent occupations in the United States. As treatment in hospitals becomes more and more complex, it is important to adequately prepare healthcare professionals since they make multiple critical decisions. Integrating knowledge gained from the nursing education into the care process motivates nurses to implement culturally proficient care that meets overall care needs. To improve the quality of care, nurses should understand the challenges of cultural sensitivity and the linguistic context of health disparities. Patient safety events can result in negligence to communicate and address language, culture, and health literacy.
The salary difference between corporate and academic job is another concern facing workforce culture today. Most of the nurses working in the corporate healthcare organizations complains of underpaid and heavy workloads compare to those nurses working in academic jobs.
Excessive workloads persist in today’s workforce culture. Understaffing of nurses in healthcare facilities is the leading cause of excessive workloads. The increase of nurse patient ratio led nurses to exhaustion, fatigue, and less motivation to do their work. It is crucial to review the norms of workload of nurses and regulations for equipping their workplaces to meet the modern requirements. It is necessary to pay attention to the dominance of atypical functions in nurses. Today, such specialists are responsible for transporting, lifting, moving patients, operating equipment boxes, and more. An important and, unfortunately, unresolved issue is the safety of a nurse at the workplace. It includes the lack of adequate anti-epidemic protection, constant use of disinfectants and medicines, lack of special clothing, and attacks on nurses made by the patients. The excessive workload of nurses leads to early burnout, lack of personal protective equipment is the cause of mass allergies, and vulnerability to the aggression of some patients markedly reduces the motivation to become a nurse (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017).
The healthcare workforce has a pool of the older and more experienced employees as well as the younger generation of healthcare professionals and other support staff. The generational differences and diversity among employees manifest through variations in core values and work culture. For instance, the younger generation of employees are less concerned about the bureaucratic processes and reporting structures within the hospital, preferring instead to make use of the informal reporting and communication channels (Udod & Racine, 2018). The older employees are more bureaucratic and tend to follow the formal channels of work and reporting. However, the younger generation of employees are more culturally competent than the older generation due to their multicultural training and experiences.
References :
Fiorio, C. V., Gorli, M., & Verzillo, S. (2018). Evaluating organizational change in health care: the patient-centered hospital model. BMC health services research, 18(1), 95. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-2877-4.
Udod, S., & Racine, L. (2018). diversity in health care organizations. In Wagner, J. (Eds). Leadership and influencing change in nursing. University of Regina Press.
Salmond, S. W., & Echevarria, M. (2017). Healthcare transformation and changing roles for nursing. Orthopedic Nursing, 36(1), 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1097/NOR.0000000000000308