A patient’s needs should always be top priority to anyone working in the health profession. With the increased rate of burnout seen among these professionals, the focus on patient care is becoming blurred by personal exhaustion. Nurses who are experiencing altered states of awareness due to exhaustion exhibit lapses in judgment which inevitably result in errors in patient care (CNA, 2010). A study completed found that for each additional patient over four in an RN’s workload, the risk of death for hospital patients increases by seven percent. Patients in hospitals where each nurse is responsible for eight patients have a 31 percent higher risk of dying than those in hospitals with a four to one patient-nurse ratio (Aiken, L., et al., 2010).
