Since last year when the pandemic attacked the whole world unexpectedly, all hospitals were stocked with growing numbers of patients, which mainly had crossed and become even more than the number of beds that could accommodate patients in hospitals. Since the healthcare institutions were not prepared beforehand for working under such stressful and unanticipated conditions, the consequences of such havoc have been dreadful.

 

Because of the decreased number of healthcare staff, such employees have had to deal with heightened burden and pressure created at the workplace, juggling between assisting doctors, looking after the patients, being at their service at all times due to increase in the number of patients and less staff. This has resulted in tremendous increase in stress, fatigue and anxiety levels among the hospital staff like nurses, physicians, even doctors. Hence, the health of such staff has been observed to be negatively affected, thus increasing all the more pressure on hospitals to perform their operations efficiently.   

 

Patience care, which is considered to be the utmost objective of hospitals, has been witnessed to be drastically impacted as a result of the dearth of nurses, doctors, etc. Since the numbers of patients admitted who caught the virus is paramount, and nurses and doctors are way less in comparison, the healthcare workforce has not been able to fulfill the need of adequate patient care efficiently, as it has become challenging for them to look after each and every patient with attentive care. The most severe impact of such a crisis has been increased patient deaths, which could have been saved if this gap of adequate staff present may have been bridged.

 

It is not only the patients, nurses, doctors and the other hospital staff which has been affected due to this shortage of healthcare staff, but there has been a massive negative impact even at the hospital as an institution. Not only have the operations to run the hospital have been reduced in efficiency, but there has been an increase in the costs related to this complication. The hospitals have had to provide add on perks and benefits to retain the existing staff. They have provided increasing health insurances to their employees, and frontline workers because of them being more prone and exposed to risk of catching the virus. The recruitment and hiring process to be carried out by healthcare staffing firms to fulfill the demand of nurses etc. has also been an extra cost to hospitals at this time.

Hospitals are currently trying to to the fullest to bridge this gap, and they are making their best efforts to strike the optimum imbalance created in the patient is to nurse or other staff ratio