Understaffed Nurses: Article Analysis

Call bells ringing, heart monitors beeping, patients crying out in pain, and nurses sprinting from room to room. All of these are common sights and sounds in hospitals these days: especially with the increasing numbers of hospitalized patients and a decrease in the amount of nursing staff available. While being down a nurse or two on a unit may not seem like the end of the world to some, it is a huge crisis in hospitals these days. Understaffed nurses are being forced to take on more patients and pick up more overtime shifts to make up for the shortage of nurses. As Sung-Heui Bae points out in his article, “Presence of Nurse Mandatory Overtime Regulations and Nurse and Patient Outcomes,” this in turn puts patient at a high risk for nosocomial infections, falls, and even medication errors (Bae, 2013). Patients come to hospitals to heal and recover from whatever disease or ailment they are battling. If nurses are being overworked and taking on more patients than they should, they become unable to give the …show more content…
The researchers of this article used a single descriptive study. While it was not clearly labeled what type of study it was it could be deduced: it provided information on naturally occurring events and behaviors in relation to the number of hours the group of RN’s worked. They sent out packages including consent form and the instruments to be used (the demographic form, the nurse’s hours’ form, the outcomes form, and the organization productivity form) to select hospitals. From there, only the nurses who were eligible were given the survey. They ended up with an 85.09% response rate, receiving 1524 back of the 1791 they sent out (Kunaviktikul et al.