Leadership and nursing care management Assignment

Leadership and nursing care management - Assignment Example Scheduling and staffing in nursing care management is an aspect of management that poses a lot of challenges to managers. Formulating strategies to achieve the goal of bringing new nurses to the nursing profession and scheduling already recruited nurses is quite important to the profession. Employing forceful and well-researched scheduling tactics will tap the skills and competencies of qualified workers to the profession and on the right jobs (Seifert, 2000). After employing a new workforce, efforts must be taken to properly schedule the current nurses on the basis of their wealth of knowledge and expertise which are vital for assisting and developing trainee nurses into experts and sustaining qualified service delivery. The reason this topic is chosen is the negative physical and mental health consequences of poor scheduling on overworked health care employees. In addition, poor scheduling results in domestic problems as employees have little or no time for families and friends. Fi nally, low morale in employees due to overwork and lack of understanding and consideration from managers and administrators results in reduced productivity (Chin, 2008). This essay discusses the modern trends in staff and scheduling strategies as well as the challenges that these process pose to the management. Finally, it provides research based recommendations on how to solve problems of staff and scheduling in nursing care management. Implications of Staff Shortage on Scheduling Staffing plays a rather critical role in the operation budget of health care facilities. In fact, for many health care facilities, it has been established that up to between 50% and 70% of operation budget goes to staffing issues. It is thus a counterproductive trend or practice to ignore or underestimate the necessity of effective and efficient staff management strategies and nurse scheduling processes (Buchanan, 2002). In general, staffing and scheduling strategies and practices should not result in unc alled for overtime, lopsided caseloads and even staff suffering exhaustion. As is generally understood, unhappy or discontented staff implies unproductive and unprofitable business (Buchanan, 2002). For optimal staff scheduling practices that would yield happy and contended nurses, it is of the essence that a balance is struck between resident perceptions and the skill levels of the nurses in question (Buchanan, 2002). Importantly, health care managers should ensure that staff schedules are tightly connected to the needs and populations of the clients to be attended. Managers should be consistent in their scheduling, considering that no single nurse would want to work on holidays and every other weekend. Thus, there should not be any indications of favoritism in staff scheduling. This fairness would ensure no employee grumbles given that employees are the greatest asset that a health care facility may have. In addition, it pays for health care managers who ensure their nurses and ot her staffs are happy as this happiness would translate to better care and improved client outcomes (Buchanan, 2002). Numerous challenges are often encountered in staff scheduling, staff shortage being a key challenge. There is a wide spread shortage of registered nurses (RNs) in many countries including The United States of