A Wide Problem in Healthcare: STRESS ON NURSES IN HOSPITALS

A new study from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) shows that nurses are playing an increasingly important role in quality improvement initiatives as hospitals throughout the country are under increasing pressure to engage in a variety of these activities. The organizational cultures of hospitals create the conditions for quality improvement initiatives and the responsibilities that nurses play in them. Successful staff engagement in improvement initiatives is said to be more likely in hospitals with supportive leadership, a quality-as-everyone's-duty mentality, individual accountability, physician and nurse champions, and effective feedback. The lack of nursing resources, the difficulty of involving nurses at all levels, from the bedside to management, the increasing demands to engage in more, frequently redundant, quality improvement activities, the burdensome nature of data collection and reporting, and the shortcomings of traditional nursing education in preparing nurses for their changing role in today's modern hospital setting are some of the challenges hospitals face when it comes to nursing involvement. The quality of care given, as well as treatment and patient outcomes, can be greatly influenced by nurses, who are the primary caregivers in hospitals. The ability of hospitals to effectively engage and deploy nurse resources is therefore crucial to their pursuit of high-quality patient care, and this will probably become more difficult as these resources become scarcer.