Nursing Shortage during Covid-19 Pandemic

Nursing Shortage during Covid-19 Pandemic
Nurses play a significant role in care for patients with different health care needs. Nurses spend most of their time caring for patients. The issue of nursing shortage ha e affects the health care system of the United States and other countries in the world in different weight (Al Thobaity & Alshammari, 2020). The nursing shortage results in poor quality and unsafe health care because the nurses are forced to use the most energy in the care of more patients than expected. When not managed and handled at the right time, the nurse-patient ratio increases, increasing work fatigue, burnout, job dissatisfaction, and turnover among the nurses. The patients’ health outcome is also affected because patients receive inadequate care, low quality, and unsafe care, which further affects the experience of the patients and satisfaction.

The covid-19 pandemic affected all parts of the world, resulting in numerous deaths and several patients developing severe symptoms. Al Thobaity & Alshammari (2020) argued that the pandemic caused a strain in the healthcare system because the health professionals were also infected, and with the limited number of nurses who existed pre-Covid pandemic, patients suffered the most. The nursing shortage was aggravated by a lack of other health resources, which resulted in more deaths among the patients.

The covid-19 pandemic made several patients not seek health care services from the hospital because of the fear of the disease and the need to follow the world health organization regulation on the preventive measures of Covid-19 disease. Telehealth came in handy to help deliver health care to different patients and the comfort of their homes. However, the impact of the nursing shortage was still felt because the number of nurses to provide care to the critically ill patients presenting with severe symptoms of Covid-19 was still lower than expected. Other countries had to receive the help of health professionals, including nurses from different countries, to help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The limited access to personal protective equipment further aggravated the shortage of nurses in the nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic. With the absence of the appropriate nurse-patient ratio, the nursing homes had difficulty maintaining infection control measures even when there was a risk of increased monetary penalties. As a result, the Covid-19 virus, which increased the number of nurses sent home for isolation, infected the nurses and other health care professionals and others admitted in the hospitals for medical care. The nurses were not immune to the covid-19 virus, which also made them the victims of the disease, causing the deaths of several nurses and other health professionals.

According to Al Thobaity & Alshammari (2020), the recovery from the impact of covid-19 disease can be made challenging because of the nursing shortage that caused a backlog in providing routine care to the patients and the increased demand for health care services among the patients. The governments of different countries are forced to think of measures of ensuring that they exceed the target number of nurses per year in the health care system, which is difficult to achieve because no one oversaw the occurrence of a covid-19 pandemic. The occurrence of the pandemic further affected the economy of several countries, which makes the government think twice in choosing the increase in the number of nurses in the health care system or increasing the required resources for fighting against covid-19, such as personal protective equipment and the delivery of the vaccine to various individuals.

References

Al Thobaity, A., & Alshammari, F. (2020). Nurses on the frontline against the COVID-19 pandemic: an Integrative review. Dubai Medical Journal, 3(3), 87-92. https://doi.org/10.1159/000509361

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