Help with philosophy/advocacy paper!

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Jul 17, 2007

Just guessing here because I don't know what your class or class lectures have been about, but. . .

One management issue I can think of is employee attendance. Employees are expected to show up for work. However, in healthcare, there are times when a sick employee just isn't a good idea to have around a sick patient (i.e., anyone with a compromised immune system, etc.) so you have to validate not putting a sick nurse with patients.

Another issue might be productivity. Traditionally, in many businesses a worker's value is measured by their total output (as in factory production lines, for example). However, in healthcare, productivity cannot be measured by the number of patients a nurse sees a day or the number of specific hands-on tasks they perform. There is a human communication element involved in the work that is difficult to account for. Thus, there are probably a hundred different acuity/staffing programs out there for facilities to use to rationalize and justify nurse/patient ratio staffing numbers. The bottom line for the bean counters is always the cost in terms of salaries paid out to the nurses.

If you were sitting in a management meeting with a young accountant who was merely looking at the bottom line figures and knew nothing about how the nursing profession worked, I would imagine that these were the kinds of things you would have to justify and advocate for nursing with this person. He would be looking at what increases costs of operation and nursing is looking at what increases patient standards or care. Nursing departments have had to swim upstream against this for years because nursing departments are big cost expenditures for facilities and don't bring in cash like other department (i.e. radiology) do. Just my ideas on this.