When No One Is On Call Essay

As a healthcare provider, we are faced with some of the most grueling, challenging dilemmas. Each factor plays an important role in the quality of healthcare provided to our community: competent, available staff, appropriate resources or materials, hospitals bed availability, and the list continues. “When No One is On Call” perfectly depicts the everyday struggle of healthcare providers, when there isn’t enough staff to care for the rising influx of patients. It is unfathomable that even with new nurses graduating and entering the work field each year, the number of patients at risk for poor health care are still increasing due to shortages. Theresa Brown outlines a shocking statistic stating, “20,000 people a year die because they were in …show more content…
As one patient is being discharged, members of environmental services are waiting nearby to quickly clean it and replace it with the next. The lack of compassionate, quality care is being compromised due to this factory-like atmosphere it takes on to keep up with the heavy flow. “More demands for paperwork, along with increasing complexity of care, means the amount of time any nurse has for all her patients is diminishing” (Brown, 2013). Instead of performing a thorough nursing assessment and diagnosis, nurses are preoccupied by the other 8-10 patients they must care for. Because each patient isn’t given the proper attention, it is extremely difficult to accurately monitor the patient, leading to failure to observe the patient’s changing condition. The structure of a chaotic environment affects all members of the ED, while physicians are feeling pressured to assess and evaluate as many patients as humanly possible, leading to unsafe discharges. Oftentimes, these unsafe discharges are witnessed by their nurses, but have too many tasks to get done to realize their patients have even been discharged. This leads to the failure to question patient discharge, which is one of many critical responsibilities nurses must adhere