Stress on Nurses in Hospitals: A Multidimensional Crisis in Healthcare

Abstract

A new study from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) shows that nurses are playing an increasingly important role in quality improvement initiatives as hospitals throughout the country are under increasing pressure to engage in a variety of these activities. The organizational cultures of hospitals create the conditions for quality improvement initiatives and the responsibilities that nurses play in them. According to reports, hospitals with supportive leadership, a quality-as-everyone's-duty mindset, individual accountability, physician and nurse champions, and effective feedback have a higher chance of having staff members successfully participate in improvement initiatives. Yet hospitals confront challenges with regard to nursing involvement, including: scarcity of nursing resources; difficulty engaging nurses at all levels from bedside to management; increasing pressure to engage in more, frequently redundant, quality improvement initiatives; the difficulty of gathering and reporting data; and the inadequacies of conventional nursing education in preparing nurses for their changing position in the modern hospital environment. Because nurses are the key caregivers in hospitals, they can significantly influence the quality of care provided and, ultimately, treatment and patient outcomes. The ability of hospitals to effectively engage and deploy nurse resources is therefore crucial to their pursuit of high-quality patient care, and this will probably become more difficult as these resources become more scarce.