Nurses in Hospital: Major Problems and Challenges

Nurses in Hospital: Major Problems and Challenges

Nurses form the backbone of any medical services or patient care in the health sector. But in India, this important section of workers are highly exploited, with lack of respect and dignity at workplaces and more importantly paid extremely low salaries with lack of job security. The proliferation of private nursing educational institutions has led to churning out a large number of nursing graduates who have little choice but to join private/ corporate hospitals often at extremely low wages.

Shortage of Staff Nurse

There are numerous problems faced by Nurses in hospitals and one of the important is staff shortage which leads to more work pressure for staff Nurse. Nurses are working day and night but their salary package is very poor compared to western countries. Staff nurse are very low in number in most hospital, even in multispecialty hospitals, the numbers of staff nurse is very poor. Most staff nurse are carry out work of two to three people, thus lead to stress and difficult to survive and focus on their personal activities. If this trend is continues, the condition of staff nurse will be very worst and lead to mental stress. For example, when doctor used to come for rounds between 10 to 11 A.M every day, Nurses need to report to doctors about condition of the patients. If two or more doctors are joined for rounds at the same time, then staff nurse will be difficult to address the conditions of the patient to doctors

Working Hours

Most hospitals don’t follow regular working hours for Nurses as the result they need to spend little more time for hand over task to Nurses, article check list etc. Most of the nurses are forced to work beyond the mandatory 8 hrs working day, to more than 10 to 11 hrs. Apart from low wages, none of the nurses are given employment benefits like Provident Fund (PF) and gratuity. The nurses are not even given health coverage despite facing higher risk of infections.

Assigning Duties

Every hospital has random way of assigning duties to Nurses. If Nurses are interested to work on ICU but they are denied to work, instead they are allowed to work in different departments. Nurses work as machine by sacrificing passion for the particular department.  Freshers need to learn the work of every department, but six months or one year later, they need to assign job duties according to their interest in the department. If they work in selective department which they like to work, then there will be more job satisfaction.

Questioning Nurses for Every Problem in Hospital

Nurses are questioned for every problem but the real problem may be from other sides or department. For example, if blood and X-ray report are getting late, they blame only Staff Nurses but this delay because of other reasons or another department.

Disrespect for Nurses

In hospitals, the story of disrespect is same as in other sectors. Most Staff Nurses are treated badly with abusive language in few work places and senior Nurses treating the new recruit nurse is very bad. Most often, the senior Nurses will show their domination to their juniors and some time, they never help them to learn the procedure and techniques. There is also the lack of work place ethics and respect for the nurse profession, with harassment by either doctors or the management by constantly accusing them of dereliction of duty.