Research has shown that nursing shortages on the units impact the nurses by the following: larger workloads, decreasing quality of patient care, occupational burnout, low retention rates, and high turnover rate. The purpose …show more content…
The first stage of Lewin’s Change Theory is unfreezing: accepting that change necessary by breaking down the current system as counterproductive and decreasing the restraining forces (as citied in Current Nursing, 2013). An essential step is recognizing the faults with the current system and getting ready for change in the system. A current fault is while Hospital administrators believe that there is a nursing shortage, many do not believe that the nursing short is affecting the patient outcomes (as citied in Cramer, Jones, & Hertzog, …show more content…
One transition to increase client outcomes with a nursing shortage is to hire RN’s with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) and higher education. A RN-BSN has been shown to decrease patient adversities such as “failure to rescue, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, shock and cardiac arrest, and upper gastrointestinal bleeding, and decreased length of hospital stay in medical and major surgery patients,” and patient mortality (as citied in Cramer et al., 2011, p.