Milestone Three

Concepts of Inter-Professional Collaboration, Ethics, and Theory to the Nursing Issue.

For this milestone three, evidence-based resources are used to address critical elements, including inter-professional collaboration, conceptual framework/theory from outside nursing, nursing conceptual model/theory, nursing metaparadigm concept, and evidence-based solutions to nursing shortages in the United States.

Inter-Professional Collaboration

Inter-professional collaboration happens when two or more professions work jointly to attain a common goal and is often applied to address various complex issues and problems. In nursing, the idea refers involvement of diverse professional healthcare providers working with caregivers, families, and patients to consider each other’s unique viewpoint of providing the best quality care, and can be adopted to address issues linked to nursing shortages (Kang, Brom, Lasater, & McHugh, 2020). Nurse-physician collaboration is perceived as a new and important strategy to manage the ongoing shortage. The inter-professional collaboration between nurses and physicians is seen as the best way to work together to meet the patient’s needs while valuing the unique abilities of the distinct professions. It can help minimize errors, prevent complications, sustain optimal patient response, increase job satisfaction, and lower healthcare costs (Tan, Zhou, & Kelly, 2017). Many errors occur when nurses feel overwhelmed, and being assisted by a physician can ease the pressures.

Conceptual Framework/Theory From Outside Of Nursing

Theories of supply and demand is an example of a theory from outside nursing that can explain nursing shortages. Labor markets have demand and supply curves, operating the same way as the goods market. Higher market prices/wages mean to lower the quantity of labor demanded by employers, while lower wages increase the demand. On the supply side, a higher price/wage for labor means a higher supply, and lower wages imply a low supply (Erixon, 2018). The cause of nursing shortage in the US is three-fold, aging population, aging workforces, and inadequate supply of new nurses. The baby boomers are aging and leaving the workforce, while nursing faculty shortages surpass pre-licensure admission capacities, leading to limited nursing supply. AACN states that US nursing schools rejected about 80,000 eligible applicants because of insufficient faculty, academic space, and low budgetary allocation (Snavely, 2016). Besides, many nurses are also leaving the workforce because of burnout caused by the shortages. Hospitals can apply the law/principle of supply by providing better remunerations to attract and retain quality nurses.

Nursing Conceptual Model/Theory

One example of a nursing model that helps understands the current nursing shortage dynamics is the Jean Watson nursing model. The model postulates that supporting nursing staffing guarantees quality care from the nurses to the patients. Watson’s theory contends that nursing care is not merely a practice but an effort to bring a patient to optimal health as a caregiver (Smith, 2019). For nurses to do so, they must feel supported, including adequate staffing to avoid burnout and nurse-physician collaboration to improve healthcare outcomes.

Nursing Metaparadigm Concepts

There are four common nursing metaparadigms, including person, health, environment, and nursing, that must be comprehensively be defined. In the nursing metaparadigm, a nurse is not just someone who understands physiology and science behind an illness during patient treatment but should holistically and genuinely care for others’ wellbeing. The nurse should consider the person/patient holistically, both physical and non-physical dimensions such as soul, and provide a caring and healing environment that help the patient to actualize inner power. Healing means regaining wholeness in mind, body, and soul (Nikfarid, Hekmat, Vedad, & Rajabi, 2018). For such to be achieved, the nurses must be in their good state of mind, have no burnout issues, and feel adequately compensated for the job; hence adequate staffing is important.

Evidence-Based Recommended Solutions to Nursing Shortage

For a long-term solution, the healthcare leaders, government, and society must devise a way of increasing enrollment in nursing, which has been on the decline since the 1990s as women get more options to choose from when selecting a career. According to Abhicharttibutra et al. (2017), ensuring a continuous robust pool of nursing students requires that children be reached as early as high school to make them consider nursing a career. At an organizational level, hospitals can go about the nursing shortage by obeying the law of supply, increasing wages to attract more and highly qualified nurses, and meeting the shifting needs without resorting to unnecessary overtime, understaffing, floating nurses, or expensive agency (Schoenfelder, Bretthauer, Wright, & Coe, 2020). Besides, healthcare leaders must work with HR to understand what nurses seek from the work setting and use the information to enhance recruitment and retention of highly qualified nurses (Wong, Wan, & Gao, 2017). Effective recruitment and retention strategies are vital for any hospital to compete for the scarce supply of nurses.

References

Abhicharttibutra, K., Kunaviktikul, W., Turale, S., Wichaikhum, O. A., & Srisuphan, W. (2017). Analysis of a government policy to address nursing shortage and nursing education quality. International nursing review, 64(1), 22-32.

Erixon, L. (2018). Progressive supply-side economics: an explanation and update of the Rehn-Meidner model. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 42(3), 653-697.

Kang, X. L., Brom, H. M., Lasater, K. B., & McHugh, M. D. (2020). The association of nurse–physician teamwork and mortality in surgical patients. Western journal of nursing research, 42(4), 245-253.

Nikfarid, L., Hekmat, N., Vedad, A., & Rajabi, A. (2018). The main nursing metaparadigm concepts in human caring theory and Persian mysticism: a comparative study. Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine, 11.

Schoenfelder, J., Bretthauer, K. M., Wright, P. D., & Coe, E. (2020). Nurse scheduling with quick-response methods: Improving hospital performance, nurse workload, and patient experience. European Journal of Operational Research, 283(1), 390-403.

Snavely, T. M. (2016). A brief economic analysis of the looming nursing shortage in the United States. Nursing Economics, 34(2), 98-101.

Tan, T. C., Zhou, H., & Kelly, M. (2017). Nurse–physician communication–An integrated review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 26(23-24), 3974-3989.

Wong, I. A., Wan, Y. K. P., & Gao, J. H. (2017). How to attract and retain Generation Y employees? An exploration of career choice and the meaning of work. Tourism Management Perspectives, 23, 140-150.

Smith, M. C. (2019). Nursing theories and nursing practice. FA Davis.