The Impact Of Nursing Workload

Introduction
Nurses are the largest and the most trusted professional group in the health care system. They are highly educated and skilled in their areas of practice. However, today’s nurses are experiencing an ever increasing workload, which negatively impacts their ability to deliver safe patient care (Berry & Curry, 2012). This paper explores four published journals that report on survey results on nursing workload and their direct correlation with patient care outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to address the ongoing nursing workload issues and explore the reasons behind it.
Background
Surveys of Canadian frontline nurses, today, show that issues with intense workload, while ensuring safe patient care are the most significant challenges they face at work on a daily basis (Berry & Curry, 2012). Research shows that a heavy nursing workload adversely affects both the patient and nurse. For example, many Registered Nurses (RN) are experiencing ethical distress because they are not able to

A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that “annually approximately 1.7 million hospitalized patients acquire infections while being treated for other medical conditions, and more than 98,000 of these patients will die as a result of their acquired infection” (Cimiotti et al., 2012, p. 486). It was suggested that nursing burnout has been linked to suboptimal patient care and patient dissatisfaction. Also, the study shows that if the percentage of nurses with high burnout could be reduced to 10% from an average of 30%, approximately five thousand infections would be prevented (Cimiotti et al., 2012). In summary, increasing nursing staffing and reduction burnout in RNs is a promising strategy to help control urinary and surgical infections in acute care facilities (Cimiotti et al.,