Title: nurse understaffing and its relation towards incidences of nosocomial

infections

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The nursing shortage is a major phenomenon affecting nurses and the provision of patient

care. In January 2014, the High Level Forum on the Health Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs) reported, There is a human resource crisis in health, which must be addressed.

Likewise, on the same year, the World Health Organization (WHO) devoted the World Health

Report to the negative impact that human resources shortages was having on global health care.

A shortage is therefore not merely about a numbers game or an economic model, it is

about individual and collective decision-making and choice (Buchan 2010, 2015). The shortage

is not necessarily a shortage of individuals with nursing qualifications; it is a shortage of nurses

willing to work as nurses in the present conditions. It must also be noted that in previous

decades, nursing shortages have been a cyclical phenomenon, usually as a result of increasing

demand outstripping static or more slowly growing supply of nurses (Friss, 2015). Driven by

growing and ageing populations, demand for health care and for nurses continues to grow, whilst

the supply of available nurses has actually fallen or flat-lined.

The current shortage is technically caused by both inadequate short-term and long-term

supply of human resources as well as the rise in demand for nursing services. Understaffing
implies the failure of an organization or institution to provide adequate manpower. The workflow

in a hospital setting will be affected negatively as the small number of healthcare practitioners;

nurses in particular must compensate for the lack of staff. With this problem the nurses will not

be able to function optimally to provide excellent healthcare services to patients because they

have to limit the time for each patient in order to accommodate and address the individual needs

of the patients leading to poor, inadequate, unsafe and ineffective nursing service subsequently

leading to increased rates of hospital acquired infections or worse increased cases of mortality in

the hospital.

Brent Hospital is 100 bed capacity secondary hospital which caters to different health

cases in Zamboanga Peninsula. Determining how nurses perceive staffing to affect the number

of incidence of nosocomial infections. Medical practitioners need to be knowledgeable about

patient safety as they are ultimately responsible and accountable for safe patient care. It is

critical for the nurses to collaborate with interdisciplinary team members reduce the incidences

of hospital acquired infections of patients. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe

nurses perceptions of the impact of nurse staffing levels on the incidence of hospital acquired

infections.