Writing Homework Help

 

Burnout is associated with more inadequate patient safety, which has significant implications for management teams within healthcare settings. Quality patient care must first and foremost be safe, and staff well-being plays an essential role in patient safety. It would be essential that healthcare organizations provide a work environment that fosters staff well-being and protects against burnout to provide a safe service to their patients. 

Patient safety directly related to medication errors based on nurses’ inability to focus or perform tasks in a typical fashion puts a patient at risk, and this is not acceptable practice.  Breakdown in care from a fragmented healthcare system can lead to readmissions, missed diagnoses, medication errors, delayed treatment, duplicative testing and procedures, and general patient and provider dissatisfaction (Prapanjaroensin, Patrician, & Vance, 2017). 

The Institute of Health Improvement ([IHI], 2021) developed a framework that describes optimizing health system performance. IHI believes that new designs must be developed to simultaneously pursue three dimensions, which is called the “Triple Aim”.Triple Aim goals are to improve the patient experience of care (quality and satisfaction), improve the health of populations, and reduce the cost of health care (IHI, 2021). Given the recent research linking the quality of the work environment to patient outcomes, many organizations have advocated for expanding the Triple Aim to include a fourth dimension of attaining joy in work.

Triple Aim has now evolved into Quadruple Aim, which includes healthy work environments related to the Triple Aim goals. Improvement of the work environment provides an opportunity to promote joy in the workplace. Interventions to improve the work environment of health care providers are consistent with the Healthy Work Environment standards of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN, 2018). 

Are leaders asking staff members about work experiences, and are leaders listening when issues at work contribute to nursing burnout?  Staff members should be encouraged to make a solid commitment to self-care, creating their self-care plan both at work and away from work, and for times of crisis as well as calmer periods.

I spoke with my nurse manager about incidences of nurse burnout.  We discussed nurse burnout, and we both agreed that this past year had contributed more significantly to mental and physical exhaustion, and the result was substandard patient safety and a higher than average turnover rate for registered nurses on our unit and the hospital as a whole.  Our unit alone has lost three nurses in the last year for complaints of being “burned out”.  Our Nursing Department has re-initiated the retention bonus for Registered Nurses on the Spinal Cord Injury Units in hopes to improve retention rates.