Healthcare facilities are complex and challenging to manage, which became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patient satisfaction, which is the highest priority to hospitals, largely depends on staff performance (AMN Healthcare, 2021). Therefore, proper management of healthcare workers is critical to ensure good health outcomes and job satisfaction (AMN Healthcare, 2021). Although usually job presenteeism is encouraged in health institutions due to the nature of the duties that require employees’ physical presence, the coronavirus pandemic forced hospitals to review this policy. Healthcare workers were asked to stay home and work remotely when symptoms of the infection appeared to minimize the spread of the virus (Challener et al., 2021). However, inadequate staffing during the initial surge of the pandemic resulted in impeded delivery of high-quality care and caused unfavorable patient outcomes. Therefore, staffing problems should be reviewed, and new solutions should be suggested to improve the quality of healthcare during the ongoing and future pandemics. This paper aims to discuss possible ways to increase management effectiveness in healthcare facilities: closing staffing gaps, ensuring clinicians’ quality, raising patient satisfaction scores, and providing support to the staff during quarantine.
Enhancement of management effectiveness in healthcare organizations requires stringent control and appropriate support of employees. The first issue that needs to be considered is a low nurse-to-patient ratio, which means there is a shortage of nursing staff to provide proper care in hospitals (AMN Healthcare, 2021). One of the potential solutions for this problem is recruiting process outsourcing to facilitate the removal of staffing gaps (AMN Healthcare, 2021). However, it essential to deliver on-site training of new employees to prevent misunderstanding of duties and responsibilities. Second, ensuring clinician quality is critical because skilled and knowledgeable nurses can boost the efficiency of healthcare facilities (AMN Healthcare, 2021). The third issue that needs to be discussed is patient satisfaction scores determined by the quality of care (AMN Healthcare, 2021). These scores can be increased by improving nurses’ expertise and mastering schedule and workload management (AMN Healthcare, 2021). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated inadequacies of the support system for healthcare workers who required isolation (Challener et al., 2021). Therefore, it is crucial to develop staff assistance during obligatory quarantine to reduce financial and emotional stress and to maintain adequate patient care in hospitals.
To sum up, staff management in healthcare organizations revealed many deficiencies during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that led to decreased healthcare quality and poor patient outcomes. This research paper intends to determine a possible solution for improving staffing in hospitals because good quality of care often depends on effective management. I became interested in this topic since the announcement of the global lockdown. I read daily news and reports about high mortality due to COVID-19, often caused by scarcity of equipment and shortage of healthcare workers. Although vaccination programs worldwide may help stop the viral spread, the danger still exists because it is challenging to predict whether the immunity elicited by the vaccine will be potent against the new variants. Therefore, changing the staff recruitment process and scheduling, introducing quarantine support, and continuous education and training can improve patient satisfaction and reduce adverse health outcomes in hospitals due to more productive management. These interventions will benefit patients, healthcare workers, and hospital administrators to overcome difficulties associated with a low nurse-to-patient ratio during the pandemic.
Reference
AMN Healthcare. (2021). Three ways healthcare staffing boosts patient satisfaction. Web.
Challener, D. W., Breeher, L. E., Frain, J., Swift, M. D., Tosh, P. K., & O’Horo, J. (2021). Healthcare personnel absenteeism, presenteeism, and staffing challenges during epidemics. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 42(4), 388-391. Web.