Reference no: EM132925883

Discussion 1: Why are so many nurses stressed out or have burnout, there are so many reasons but one big reason is staffing shortage. Nurse staffing has some ethical and legal issues that does cause a nurse to be stressed or have burnout. As a nurse if you have a heavy assignment due to not enough staff working, and you are extremely busy, so that you may not be able to provide adequate care to all the patients in your assignment. The nurse may be able to administer all the patient's medications and other medical interventions but they may not be able to provide the psychosocial support that they may need, since their patient assignment is heavy. There could be other things that may be missed or forego and it can put the patient at risk for a poor outcome. This affects the nurse in an ethical and moral way by being placed in the position to decide on doing just the basics for all their patient's because they are short staffed and do not have time to do all of what the nurse should do (Lowrie, n.d.). A nurse choosing what they should do or not do for a patient adds a lot of stress on them, for being in an already stressful job this can cause burnout. I find when I have heavy assignment due to being short staff that something has to give, most of the time it is the documentation. I find myself staying late to complete my documentation, but that is not a good practice since I may not always remember everything I needed to document. Accurate documentation is very important for nurses to complete, the old saying is - if it is not written down it was not done. If a nurse needs to go to court for lawsuit by a patient and the documentation is not accurate enough or very little documented, the nurse may be liable for neglect or harm which may cost the nurse their license or worse. This is just one legal issue that can be associated with short staffing, the hospital management is aware of the short staffing problem which all healthcare facilities are facing and they are trying to find a solution for this problem. Short staffing will continue until there is a solution, some nurses may not be able to wait for the solution, the stress may be too much so they may choose to leave the nursing profession all together, causing more short staffing. The public may be aware that short staffing is a major issue and that failure of nursing care can result in grounds for criminal and civil prosecution according to the Federal Civil False Claims Act (Lowrie, n.d.). Nurses experience job dissatisfaction with continuous staffing shortage, leads to increase stress and burnout for all nurses which can cause the nurse physical distress/illness. Nurses need to make sure they take care of themselves and encourage self-care to our fellow co-workers; this can be hard for the nurse to do since they are the caregivers.