Nursing Management - Essay Example

The paper tells that high turnover rates may lead to poor patient outcomes because the institution could loose employees who have gained some levels of expertise, familiarity with the work environment and patient trust. This has the potential of making the hospital to loose customers leading to reduce profit margins or reduced economies of scale. The institution also incurs expenses in the process of recruiting new staff. At times, the new workforce needs to be trained on certain skills that are important for quality patient outcomes. This means the higher the turn over rates, the higher the rate at which the institution incurs these expenses. Castle and Engberg explain that when the levels of absenteeism are high, the nurses who are available are forced to take mandatory overtime and this presents extra costs to the healthcare institution. This could also affect the efficiency of the available nurses because of working under strenuous conditions. Because of this, the healthcare institution may become limited in its capacity to handle normal number of patients. Absenteeism also leads to inconsistency in managing patient cases because teams handling patients have to be changed frequently and this may lead to poor patient outcomes and reduced trust by customers. In regard to patient privacy, nurses should consider the effects of breaching privacy on the patient such as withdrawal and lack of cooperation. There are also circumstances which require that nurses weigh the importance of revealing the patient information to some relevant information verses the risks of maintaining privacy. ...