Assignment Task
Overview
As you have been working on the module you will have noticed that your sessions have guided you to a practice focused project, based on a framework encompassing 5 stages: the problem identification, a literature search stage, an evaluation of the evidence, an analysis of the evidence and finally a presentation of practice based solutions. This framework will guide you to completing and writing your project and can be used also to help you structure your assignment.
Introduction
Various initiatives and polices have been put in place by the United Kingdom government in order to alleviate problems in service delivery within the mental health sector. This study seeks to conduct a qualitative systematic review in order to analyse the impact of shortages of mental health nurses in service delivery within the NHS hospitals in England. According to Barkham et al (2010) staff shortage is an internationally recognised critical problem with adverse impacts on staff coupled with poor quality of care. Therefore, this study will focus on identifying the problem statement and why this is a concern to this segment of the health sector. A brief background to the study is presented accompanied by the research question followed by the literature review, significance of the study and research methodology /search strategy.
Background
Many NHS nurses retire when they reach age 55 or soon after and deciding on how to replace this lost skills presence a growing challenge for the NHS (Buchan 2008). Considering this Armstrong (2009) also argued that most employers are ill prepared to deal with the aging nursing workforce and there has been no attempt to implement strategies that explicitly focus on the need of the older nurses. From another perspective Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC, 2018) highlighted a decrease in the number of nurses and midwifes on their professional register. In part this can be attributed to significant outflow of nurses abroad since 2006 to Australia, New Zealand and Canada (Buchan and Seccombe 2010). Furthermore, because of the recent worldwide economic downturn and government austerity has put funding constraints on the causing a reduction in the staffing levels and service quality (Audit Commission 2013). However, in recent years the National Health Services of the UK has employed international nurse recruitment as a component of its strategy to alleviate the nursing shortage (Ross and Sochalisk 2007). In another development the English national health care regulatory body the Care Quality Commission expressed concern regarding the impact of shortages of nursing staff on patient care and patient safety (Care Quality Commission 2018), and this should be conceptualised with demand in mental health services nationally. In another study (ref) highlighted that movement of staff between wards affected morale because nurses were committed to their specific ward and to the development of long-term therapeutic relationship with specific patients and the ward (Robson and Robson, 2014).