Isn’t it strange how nurses are well-known to render patient care, yet their actions influence adverse patient outcomes? Nurses play a significant role with the improvement of patients’ health. Given a shortage of nursing staff cannot be controlled, the intense workload assigned to nurses with higher patient proportions affects quality patient care and increases nurse burnout. When hospitals are short staffed, nurses tend to take alternative routes to make sure tasks are completed within their shifts which then cause harmful effects on patients including medication errors, nosocomial infections, and pressure ulcers (Cho et al., 2016; Frith, Anderson, Tseng, & Fond, 2012). Short staffing is an ongoing problem in acute hospital settings.
