Nursing And Healthcare Trends We Can Expect To See | NurseJournal.org
The trend that I feel is interesting and important to the field of nursing and health care is staff retention. I have been nursing for 10 years and have seen a critical shortage of nursing staff. Nurses come into this profession with lofty goals. These young eager young nurses want to provide safe quality care. They have spent many years learning best practice, which is the gold standard when providing care. Only to graduate and find that in many cases it is impossible to meet these standards of practice.
New graduates are finding that the current nursing model sets them up for profound failure and poor client outcomes. Faced with constantly falling short of best practice and understanding the negative impact on clients, many of these nurses will leave the profession.
Currently in BC we do not have legislation around nurse client ratios. When I began nursing 10 years ago 4 clients per nurse was usually the standard. Today it is not uncommon for nursed to care for 6-8 clients. Why does this matter? This matters because as the number of clients each nurse cares for increases the likely hood of poor outcomes increases. Without legislation around client ratios health authorities have the ability to create very unsafe working conditions that put clients at risk and create the perfect environment for burnout and compassion fatigue.
Because of this trend I have left bedside nursing and am now teaching HCA students, and similarly in this field I see the same issues. High client loads lead to burn out and ultimately poor client care and outcomes.
I am deeply concerned about how we are managing our health care system. Until you are laying in a hospital bed waiting for your pain medication you won’t really understand the impact of the nursing shortage. But I can assure you there is a staffing crisis.
Donna Johnon
Adult learning 
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