COMMENTARY AND QUESTIONS: The United States is suffering a shortage of licensed physicians and registered nurses to provide primary health care. While the physician shortage is profession-wide, there is a greater shortage of primary care physicians than specialty physicians. Further, the United States is suffering from physician maldistribution, with more physicians (primary and specialty) choosing to practice in affluent urban areas as opposed to more economically depressed rural areas. Rural community hospitals that depend upon physician referrals for inpatient admission, outpatient surgery, and diagnostic testing revenues are suffering because there aren’t enough physicians to generate sufficient revenues for the hospital to be financially viable. Rural patients who have the economic means and ability are responding to the primary care shortage by seeking primary care in the urban areas, which means that they are referred to urban hospitals for inpatient admission, outpatient surgery and diagnostic testing.
Hospitals across the U.S. have critical shortages of nursing staff and are suffering the consequences of inadequate patient throughput. Patient throughput is the process of moving patients through the hospital at the appropriate time in the patient’s treatment so that the patient’s bed can be opened for a new revenue-generating patient. For example, an ICU patient should be moved to a lower-care medical-surgical floor as soon as possible so that the ICU bed is available for a new patient. Similarly, this same patient should be moved to a rehabilitation hospital as soon as they no longer need acute care so that the patient’s medical-surgical bed is available for a new revenue-generating patient. In some instances, patient throughput is being slowed down because there isn’t enough nursing staff on the medical-surgical floor to receive patients from the ICU or other higher care areas. The inability to move patients through the hospital to lower levels of care (and ultimately to discharge) negatively impacts the hospital’s revenues.
The combination of primary care physician shortages, physician maldistribution negatively impacting the rural areas, and critical nurse staffing shortages have a cumulative negative effect on rural community hospitals. Please discuss the following:
1. What are managerial actions that a rural community hospital CEO can take to alleviate the revenue shortfalls of the maldistribution of primary care physicians and inefficient patient throughput caused by nurse staffing shortages?
2. Should the CEO seek to recruit primary care physicians and/or nurses from foreign countries to move into the rural community and establish a professional practice in the community? If yes, there would be additional primary care physicians to make patient referrals to the hospital (e.g., revenue-generating) and additional nurses to staff the hospital clinical service locations so that patients could be moved through quicker.
3. However, what is the effect of recruiting international medical and nurse graduates to the United States on the global health care economy in less developed countries? Does the CEO have a socio-ethical duty to not recruit qualified medical practitioners away from their home country when they are sorely needed to take care of patients in that home country; or is the CEO’s duty to their own rural community in the United States?
Select your paper details and see how much our professional writing services will cost.
Our custom human-written papers from top essay writers are always free from plagiarism.
Your data and payment info stay secured every time you get our help from an essay writer.
Your money is safe with us. If your plans change, you can get it sent back to your card.
We offer more than just hand-crafted papers customized for you. Here are more of our greatest perks.
Get instant answers to the questions that students ask most often.
See full FAQWe complete each paper from scratch, and in order to make you feel safe regarding its authenticity, we check our content for plagiarism before its delivery. To do that, we use our in-house software, which can find not only copy-pasted fragments, but even paraphrased pieces of text. Unlike popular plagiarism-detection systems, which are used by most universities (e.g. Turnitin.com), we do not report to any public databases—therefore, such checking is safe.
We provide a plagiarism-free guarantee that ensures your paper is always checked for its uniqueness. Please note that it is possible for a writing company to guarantee an absence of plagiarism against open Internet sources and a number of certain databases, but there is no technology (except for turnitin.com itself) that could guarantee no plagiarism against all sources that are indexed by turnitin. If you want to be 100% sure of your paper’s originality, we suggest you check it using the WriteCheck service from turnitin.com and send us the report.
Yes. You can have a free revision during 7 days after you’ve approved the paper. To apply for a free revision, please press the revision request button on your personal order page. You can also apply for another writer to make a revision of your paper, but in such a case, we can ask you for an additional 12 hours, as we might need some time to find another writer to work on your order.
After the 7-day period, free revisions become unavailable, and we will be able to propose only the paid option of a minor or major revision of your paper. These options are mentioned on your personal order page.