After researching many journal articles regarding prolonged hospital stays, I have learned a lot regarding the topic. Although this is true, I would say that my literature review did not change my assumption on the impacts of a prolonged stay. One of the things that I discovered about prolonged hospital stays is that it not only can negatively affect the patient but it can affect the nurses/health care workers as well. Nurses are in short supply, and high in demand, and that being said, having a patient in the hospital that doesn’t necessarily need to be there will mean more work for the nurses. Nurse’s already have a lot on their plate, and of course are there to help everyone, but having one more patient who has been there simply because there was nowhere to put them, now takes time and care away from more critical patients. This overall means burnout for the nurses, and time and resources spent on a patient who doesn’t “belong” in that unit/facility.
My team and I did end up changing our proposal in terms of how we were going to implement change when it came to prolonged hospital stays. Originally we had a bigger picture in mind, but we narrowed it down to something more attainable for us. I think that our findings will open my eyes up when I go into the workforce. I will work hard to be an advocate for my patients, and be understanding that most of the time, it isn’ t their fault that they are stuck in the hospital. When we were interviewing nurses on our floor for the project, a big problem regarding prolonged hospital stays was staff shortages in long term care facilities and rehab centers. This means to me that it is a systemic issue of the need for more workers in pertinent areas of healthcare, and not an issue of where to go, but who is available to help them once they get there.
One of the team’s successes regarding this project was coming together for the nurse interview process. This is where we each asked a nurse on the floor to do a brief interview using some of the questions we had previously wrote up. This process was fun and very informative for all of us. Our teams process was to come together at the end of clinical and work on the project as a group. We felt this would make the most sense in terms of how we were going to make our proposal sound like one person was writing it, and was a great way to implement everyone’s ideas. I can’t say that our team had any challenges except for finding individual articles for this project. As a group though, we were efficient, communicative, and all worked well together.
