International Journal of Nursing Practice states

As a nurse preceptor for new grads coming on to the our unit I see the pressure there is to have all of this documentation and the amount of time away from the patient the nurse has to spend sitting down making sure the documention is intact. Now don’t get me wrong I know documentation is crucial but should it trump patient care. There is a disconnect the amount of charting done and the time spent face to face with the patient, especially considering the aging population that have not grown up in front of an electronic devise. I feel the pressure myself when im taking care of my 5-6 patients and the amount of charting needing to be completed and then God forbid I have to stay over to complete my charting. As the journal International Journal of Nursing Practice states; The Complexities in nursing documentation include three aspects: disruption, incompleteness and inappropriate charting. Related factors that influenced documentation comprised: limited nurses’ competence, motivation and confidence; ineffective nursing procedures; and inadequate nursing audit, supervision and staff development. These findings suggest that complexities in nursing documentation require extensive resolution and implicitly dictate strategies for nurse managers and nurses to take part in solving these complicated obstacles.

there needs to be a middle ground and it should be lead by nurses that are currently performing bedside nursing, not the nurses that have been away from the floor and have lost touch with the work that is being done.

Comment 2

Nursing is a constantly changing field. For as long as an individual is a nurse, they have an opportunity to learn. Patients’ needs change, and care delivery changes, resulting in a need for the nurse to understand, and adhere to these changes. Nursing research and evidence-based studies allows for nurses to thoroughly take a look at issues (or potential issues) in nursing, and find ways to fix them. One issue that has been ongoing in nursing from the beginning of time (probably since Florence nightingale years), until now is nursing staffing issues. Studies have shown that shortages in nursing staffing levels have contributed to poor patient care, and clinical errors. “The quality of care that nurses provide is influenced by individual nurse characteristics such as knowledge and experience, as well as human factors such as fatigue” (Clarke & Donaldson, 2008). In recent years, more studies have been done on understaffing nurses, and its effect on quality patient care. These studies have concluded that adequate nurse to patient ratios generally ensure that the patients receive better care. This finding is of no surprise considering, a nurse that is caring for an adequate amount of patients as more time to complete things that although may not be essential to their care, nonetheless will affect the quality of the care the patient receives. An example of this would be, a nurse that notices that her ICU patient still has residue on them from a motor vehicle accident, however that nurse may not be able to remove some of that dirt, and debris if he/she has two other very ill patients. On the other hand, that same nurse, that has only one patient would be able to give that same patient a bed bath, if he/she is her only patient. This small yet grand act of giving the patient a bed bath makes a lot of difference to the patient, and patient’s family.