Nurses and Healthcare Rationing Research Paper

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Nursing Management and Leadership

An Analysis of Healthcare Rationing

While nursing, and healthcare in general, often gets negative publicity for the idea of rationing care, in many cases it is a necessity. Hospitals and nurses only have so much time and so many resources available to them and have to decide where these resources are best invested in an ethical manner. Deciding where to ration care due to limited resources is a perplexing moral and ethical challenge in many situations, and one that is more common than most people think. Nurses must make judgements, sometimes on the spot, about where best to allocate their time consistent with their professional values. This analysis will consider the role of rationing in healthcare and nursing as well as how this challenge can be approached from an ethical perspective.

Issue

Recent studies into nursing care rationing indicate that nurses always ration their time and care, resulting to serious threats to the quality of care and patient safety; for example patient mobilization, hygiene, feeding, communication, patient support, teaching and discharge planning, surveillance and care documentation are regularly lacking or omitted (Papastavrou, 2013). Most of the rationing stems for the simple fact of scarcity in time or available resources and resources are inevitably either explicitly or implicitly rationed, sometimes without the realization that they are actually rationing care. Healthcare rationing has been extensively discussed in the medical profession and is understood as withholding beneficial interventions, mainly for cost-effectiveness reasons that occur at all levels and in all healthcare systems around the world (Papastavrou, Andreou, & Vryonides, 2014).

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However, because the idea of healthcare rationing is often an emotional and/or politically charged issue in many circles, the frequency of patterns of implicit rationing are not well-understood. One study conducted in Texas found that some degree of rationing on at least one of the nursing care activities was reported by almost all of the respondents and most rationed multiple activities; also rationing preference patterns favor completion of activities directed to meet immediate physiological needs over other activities (Jones, 2015). Implicit rationing of nursing care is the withholding of or failure to carry out all necessary nursing measures due to lack of resources; there is evidence supporting a link between rationing of nursing care, nurses' perceptions of their professional environment, negative patient outcomes, and placing patient safety at risk (Papastavrou, Panayiota, Hartini, & Anastasios, 2014). However, such rationing occurs….....

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