Nursing Leadership and Management1511

Nursing Leadership and Management

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Nursing Shortage and Nursing Turn-Over

Introduction

Nursing turn over has slowly becomes a major issue affecting nurses in their duties of delivering healthcare services to the patience. The acute shortage of the healthcare manpower especially nurses has the imperative effects which are not favourable to hospital management. For instance reduction of access to care, reduced job satisfaction and increase rate of turnover are the unfavourable situation associated with problem. This paper focuses the issues in nursing turnover and nursing shortage in healthcare and how managers and leaders in the healthcare deal with situation. The paper particularly focuses on what the nursing leaders and managers are expecting in order to deal with the crisis. The rationale of the leaders expectation is based on the principles, theories roles and leaderships skills in comparison to management skills.  

Nursing Shortage

The increase number of the retiring registered nurses contributes positively to the increase in shortages of nurses in the healthcare facilities. The scenario developing is that the number of nurses joining collages is smaller than the number of nurses retiring annually thus leading to shortages at long run. Beside he retirement, the raising number of the aging population who needs nurse care are on the rise. This pushes the shortage of nurses further and thus worsens the supply of personal to the industry. According to the studies done by Huber, (2010)  Nurses below the age of thirty years are have gradually reduce and thus are few in the industry. The studies reveal that between the years 1980 to 2004, the ratio of the registered nurses below the age of thirty years gradually reduced from 24% to 8% in the entire period (Huber, 2010). Thus the scenario has negative impact in the management and leadership of the hospital. Therefore nurse leaders need to adopt a strategy that will encourage more students to join nursing to alleviate the situation in the long run.

        An alternative method of dealing with problem of high shortage of nurses is for the mangers to provide relocation gratuity to those nurses willing to change their place of work. Other studies reveal at least a third of the nursing professionals will soon attain the age of fifty years as per the current trend of nursing and healthcare personnel. This situation directly correlates to the average age projected for a nurse to serve in a fulltime job of about forty eight years (Force, 2005). Nurse Managers are task with role of restructuring their models of clients care services and providing the necessary support to the older nurses in the practices.  This leads to challenge of restricting the model to suit the entire situation in the healthcare. Nursing being a physical demanding task, nurse managers has to be concern with aged nurses during their practices. Therefore nurse managers need to come up with new approaches that lead to effective practices and optimal management of the hospitals. For instance, nurse managers can assist the aged nurses by providing them with flexible schedules, moment off work and sabbaticals.