As staff is reduced, the remaining nurses are forced to take more shifts and work additional mandatory overtime. As a result, more nurses leave due to burnout and frustration with the system. Finally, staffing reaches the breaking point where a hospital can barely continue to do business, and then heroic measures are taken to re-staff and improve pay and working conditions. But in the coming years, the restaffing part of the cycle may not work due to the shrinking pool of nurses. Nurses are the front line in quality hospital medical care.
Doctors know it, hospital administrators know it and so do patients and their families.
The risk of serious complications and needless suffering rise in inverse proportion to the size and quality of a hospital s nursing staff. One of the problems afflicting everyone in the system, including patients, is the hugely wasteful process of record keeping. I was personally reminded of the problem over the past six months as I sought medical care for a nagging injury and went through diagnostic tests to ensure that my problem was minor. Over and over again, I filled out the same forms with the same information about my personal and medical history. In some doctors offices, I filled out the same information twice on two different forms.