Understaffing of hospitals has served as a major problem for years. In recent years, this issue has come to light in a major, national way.
Unfortunately, understaffing leads to a number of other problems which also wreak havoc in the hospital. This can even include negligence.
What is understaffing?
The National Library of Medicine discussed the impact of understaffing on nurses. Understaffing is essentially just as it sounds. It occurs in any situation or location where a hospital simply does not have enough staff per shift to cover all of the needs of the patients.
What is negligence?
Negligence, on the other hand, typically gets defined as actions or behaviors that do not meet a patient’s needs. This can manifest in numerous ways, such as not giving patients their medicines in time or in the correct dose, or not checking on a patient frequently enough for their health.
How does understaffing lead to negligence?
In the end, understaffing can lead to negligence due to the fact that nursing staff ends up spread too thin. The chances of a nurse forgetting to give a patient a dose of medication is much higher if that nurse has to watch over fifty people, rather than five. Mistakes also happen more often when nurses feel tired, which goes hand in hand with understaffing.
However, no matter what the reason, negligence is still an issue that can cause serious damage to the lives that it impacts. For this reason, those who experience hospital negligence or neglect have avenues they can take to gain compensation for their hardships.
