Understanding Compassion Fatigue and Economic Advocacy in Nursing
Compassion fatigue is a state in which your work brings greater distress than satisfaction
(Sheppard, 2015; Stamm, 2010). This is a product of flawed organizational design that prevents you from
upholding your ethical duty as an advocate, a caregiver, and a trusted clinician.
Compassion fatigue
sets the stage for low morale, exhaustion, emotional disengagement, apathy, absenteeism, and
impaired job performance (Sheppard, 2015).
What can we do as nurses to persevere and quantify our contribution? How do we take the line item of
nurse labor out of the bundled cost center for services rendered and reallocate our services as a driver
of quality, health, and public trust? The most important driver is labor cost (Stafseth, Tønnessen, &
Fagerström, 2018; Tan et al., 2012)
Nursing through the Economic Lens
According to the National Healthcare Retention and Staffing Report (2018), the average cost of turnover
for one bedside registered nurse is $49,500 (NSI Nursing Solutions). Moreover, each percentage
increase in turnover costs the organization $337,500, and more astonishingly, 81.4% of the 137 hospitals
in 26 states participating in this survey do not track this expense (NSI Nursing Solutions, 2018).
Nurses must take the lead to put a quantifiable value on every task they perform. This is a very new
form of advocacy for many nurses. However, to achieve success with economic advocacy, no
contribution can be vague. If it is important and it is relevant to a sound discussion, then it must have an
accurate and credible unit of measurement (Drummond et al., 1987; Fraser & Melillo, 2018).
As nurse leaders, we must replace Welfare Economics theory (Drummond et al., 1997), a very common
approach to resource allocation in health care (Faller, Dent, & Gogek, 2018), with a more representative
measure of patient care to support appropriate resource allocation. As noted by Endacott (2012),
Wunsch et al. (2012), and West et al. (2014), the nurse-to-patient ratio is not an adequate formula to
represent the patients’ needs and to classify nursing activities and interventions (Stafseth,
Tønnessen, & Fagerström, 2018).
Leveraging Evidence-Based Research
Nurse leaders must take full advantage of available evidence-based research to support economic and care advocacy and engage organizational leaders in data that makes nursing workload visible and demands adequate resource allocation (Araújo et al., 2016; Miranda and Jegers, 2012; Stafseth, Tønnessen, & Fagerström, 2018).
References
Faller, M., Dent, B., & Gogek, J. (2018). The ROI of Travel Nursing: A Full-Cost Comparison of Core Staff Pay Rates to Travel Nurse Bill Rates. Nursing Economic$, 36(4), 177–181
Fraser, M. A., & Melillo, C. (2018). Expanding the Scope of Practice of APRNs: A Systematic Review of the Cost Analyses Used. Nursing Economic$, 36(1), 23–28.
NSI Nursing Solutions (2018). National health care retention & RN staffing report. Retrieved from http://www.nsinursingsolutions.com/files/assets/library/retention-institute/nationalhealthcarernretentionreport2018.pdf
Sheppard, K. (2015). Compassion fatigue among registered nurses: Connecting theory and research. Journal of Applied Nursing Research, 28 (1). 57-59. Retrieved from https://doi-org.chamberlainuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/j.apnr.2014.10.007
Stafseth, S. K., Tønnessen, T. I., & Fagerström, L. (2018). Association between patient classification systems and nurse staffing costs in intensive care units: An exploratory study. Intensive & Critical Care Nursing, 45, 78-84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iccn.2018.01.007
All content was researched and written by Ashley @ MindURhealth4U. No content was created using AI technology.
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