The Importance of Theories in Nursing Practice
Theories play a very important role to improve the nursing discipline as well as help in making decisions. Nursing theory started to develop widely in 1950s but before then nursing professionals borrowed nurses from other fields to update their practices. Physiology, psychology, medicine, and sociology are some of the disciplines where nurses borrowed theories from. They used their frameworks and concepts to come up with theories explicit to nursing practice. Middle range theories are testable so they have assisted in explaining, predicting and describing the phenomena. Inadequate staffing of nurses compromise care, thus there is a need for enough nursing levels in order to improve care. Sufficient staffing levels participate in interventions that improve patients care although every patient needs different care. The Patricia Benner’s middle range model is a suitable middle range theory usable in making patients care better despite the nursing shortage problem (Lloyd & Mertens, 2018).
Inadequate skills, labor, and finances are amongst the greatest challenges affecting most organizations in the world. In the healthcare field, the insufficiencies have led to related problems like low health care quality, hitches in management due to inadequate skills and incompetence. Providers of health care and nurses try to improvise ways of using the limited resources to deal with several issues and hospital situations. However, the inadequate hospital provisions may lead to medical errors in treatment and diagnosis (Calk, & Patrick, 2017).In most cases competent and quality health care is not guaranteed where the health workload exceeds what can be handled by a facility. Hospital shortages greatly influence legislation, organizational structure and model care and policies used in the hospital so as to meet requirements of healthcare while maintaining the quality of health care.
Shortages of nurses are a challenge in many hospitals since nurses have to ensure the services in the hospital run smoothly by performing many duties. Some of their duties are; passing information to management and patients on treatment needs and requirements, examining infections and risk factors, dressing wounds, blood flushing and culturing, drug administration, occlusions, and tubing among many more. To perform these services carefully with less pressure, competence and enough staffing are required (Bansal, 2017). Quality of these services may not be met since shortage in nursing makes the nurses to perform the services while under pressure. Involvement of nurses to patients may be limited due to many technical duties assigned to nurses. Those patients with lifestyle disorders and chronic illnesses require palliative care, risk factors advice as well as living advice on their state.
Challenges Facing the Nursing Profession
In his study, Herzberg identified nurses had totally different occasions which they were positive feelings pertaining job satisfaction compared to events which had job dissatisfaction. The related factors of job dissatisfaction were rarely identified in occasions described with job satisfaction. Conversely, factors involved in job satisfaction are rare in job dissatisfaction events. Thus according to Herzberg both job dissatisfaction and satisfaction are two unique, separate attitudes. They are in a different continuum with their unipolar concepts been separate. A nurse can experience either low or high job satisfaction at the same time with either low or high job dissatisfaction (Wenke, Mickan, & Bisset, 2017).
Herzberg defined strong determinants of job satisfaction as motivator factors. The factors include recognition, responsibility, and achievement, the possibility of growth, work itself and achievement. He asked nurses to give interpretations of described events and give reasons as to why they changed their feelings (Braun, & Zolfagharian, 2016). The results clearly showed that a man’s desire for growth made motivator factors to lead to job satisfaction; just like Herzberg believes; growing psychologically is part of man’s set of needs.
Herzberg described the job dissatisfaction factors as hygiene factors. They include interpersonal relations, effects on personal life, status, hospital policy and administration, salary, working conditions and job security. These factors show the relationship of an individual with the job environment. The interpretation of nurses who are the subject in this case to these factors shown that hygiene factors lead to job dissatisfaction since it every mans need to stay away from unpleasant events; just like Herzberg suggests that the second set of desire for man is avoiding pain.
The management should know that both motivator and hygiene factors are unipolar meaning they are distinct and separate from each other. No job satisfaction is the opposite of job satisfaction.Similarly the no job dissatisfaction is the opposite of job dissatisfaction (Gomes, & Proença, 2015). According to Herzberg some people solely get job satisfaction from hygiene factors. The reason for this is that they are not yet in personality development stage where the needs for self-actualization are active or having learned to take hygienic factors positively from their past experience. He believes that motivators lack in a job, employees become more sensitive to either imagined or real poor hygiene practices. Motivator factors are described as long-range whereas hygiene is range shortly.
According to Herzberg, a combination of motivators with good hygiene practices leads to a motivated performance. He has shown the practical use of theory in the hospital theory by utilizing Orthodox Job Enrichment. It primarily requires the installation of motivational factors in individual’s job. This varies depending on the situation. He further outlines essentials orthodox job enrichment factors as a function of learning, chance for each individual to schedule his personal work, control over resources, a relationship of client to an employee, personal accountability, unique expertise as well as direct communication. The outcomes were increases in performance (Podmoroff, 2015). This theory can solve the problem of nursing shortages since if all factors are taken into account the rate of nurses turnover will reduce hence ensuring that hospitals have adequate nurses for the various assigned jobs.
Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of Motivation
It was developed by Herzberg Fredrick and broadly verified. Occupations involving a great range of job levels, skills, organization types, and workers too were studied. The desire of human beings to psychological grow and still need of avoiding pain just as an animal are the two set of needs which Herzberg beliefs in and form the basis of this theory. He carried out a study of two hundred accountants and engineers so as to develop his theory. His interviews were about work events which experiences lead to either improvements or reductions in levels of job satisfaction. They were also required to provide a series of occasions in their jobs which led to positive and negative feelings.
The borrowed theory has been applied in several cases since is applicable in all medical fields. The theory was specifically applicable in the nursing profession because nurses enter into the profession with great passion to care for others but lack of hygiene factors together with stressful conditions in work causes dissatisfaction in their job. The theory has been used by employers of nurses to identify motivational factors such as achievement, responsibility, job interest, career advancement, personal growth, and recognition. They also able to identify hygiene factors like job security, pay rate, relations with others, working conditions, company policies and the quality of supervision (Podmoroff, 2015). This identification has helped them to deal with nurses while applying favorable factors so as to avoid the problem of nursing shortage.
Herzberg argues that the two main factors that are responsible for job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are maintenance and motivation representing extrinsic and intrinsic. He continues to reveal that the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of nurses depend on environmental factors of the work, spiritual feeling, and motivation. Work environment includes helpful and supportive colleagues, medical resources, patient and doctor perceptions, good job relationships, working conditions, leadership skills, work discrimination as well as benefit and reward. Spiritual feelings involving nurses are rewards from GOD, religious faith and renewed energy which arises from being recognized positively by patients and the family members of patients. Motivation in this case intrinsic one been what satisfies or interests a nurse (Kessler, 2013). The motivation factors include professional development, task requirements, and clinical autonomy. Herzberg further suggests that good task performance of nurses lead to satisfaction. This increase in satisfaction leads to improvements in service experience, the satisfaction of patients and the performance of an organization in the healthcare field. Increase in nurse loyalty and satisfaction will positively contribute to reducing the challenge of nurse shortage. The theory remains to be the best of all in motivating nurses.
Application of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory in Nursing
The nursing profession is facing challenges relating to retention and recruitment. Nurses make the largest group of health professionals in the world. Thus they make the human face in health care. Organizations are challenged when experienced nurses leave since this leads to nursing shortages. The shortage leads to measurable effects in healthcare service delivery hence the need of attracting and keeping new nurses. Application of Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation helps in creating a culture where a workforce engages all generations thus having high retention rates. According to the borrowed theories, supervisor – subordinates relations of high quality lead to higher chances of accessing information, support and resources resulting in higher job satisfaction and fewer turnover intentions. Incentives should be applied to support the retaining of nurses and to encourage more people in the nursing field ( Mathe, 2012). The incentives act as motivation which leads to job satisfaction.
The nurse’s environment will also significantly predict their job satisfaction and leaving intentions. The theory is applied by leaders in hospitals to understand how empowerment and job satisfaction are related; this brings the benefit of implementing strategies which retain nurses as they improve the outcomes of patient care. Thus healthcare managers should focus on job satisfaction as a way of retaining nurses. The theory thus helps to reduce nursing shortages as it gives insights to health managers and nurses on how they can have maximum job satisfaction.
The middle range model can help in getting a solution to the problem since it can change the nursing practice realm through enhancing continuous learning in the field of nursing. This is because this theory increases skills and competence of research and nurses throughout the field. The model still assists in promoting interpersonal relationships for nurses since they are guided and get mentored by colleague nurses (Li, Zhong, Zhinan, Hao, Xinyan, Heng, & Coyte, 2014). Thus these factors help in reducing nursing shortage. Integration of this with the above-mentioned factors of Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation which aim at job satisfaction will definitely give a solution to the challenge of nursing shortages in hospitals.
Conclusion
To conclude, insufficiencies of nurses will continuously increase in future. The reason has been that job satisfaction is related to nursing retention. Thus it is recommended that administrators in hospitals to ensure proactive measure are taken in order to retain staffs. Some proactive interventions aimed at reducing the influence of intrinsic factors are; hospital managers enhancing commitment and empowerment of nurses and creating promotion opportunities for nurses (Galletta, Portuguese, Pile, Piazza, & Campagna, 2016). In addition, the administrators to take steps aimed at reducing negative effects of extrinsic factors on job satisfaction of nurses. The information on extrinsic job factors, job satisfaction, and intrinsic factors is important to health managers who are concerned with quality patient care as well as the happiness of their employees.
References
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