What’s Missing When It Comes to Our Safety

Aidan Stetzer

Liberal Studies Senior Capstone Project Proposal

Community Engaged Service-Learning

3/3/2023
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The question at hand is whether the medical healthcare profession is a safe environment.
Not only mentally but physically. Not just an overall view on the healthcare profession but
nursing specifically. My current concentration is in Biology, and I plan to go to nursing school
post-graduation. My goal is to job shadow nurses as a PCA a personal care assistant also known
as a nurse’s aide. During this time, I will interview nurses who have worked in a time before
covid, nursing covid, and post covid. This will then answer the question of whether their mental
and physical health has ever been at risk. Along with how their mental and physical health was
altered during nursing school as that is what leads up to a profession in nursing. An article found
on the “National Library of Medicine” addresses some issues that pertain to the safety of nurses
and it mostly corelates to the nursing profession being understaffed and it is causing an unsafe
nurse to patient ratio. Effecting not only the nurses’ safety and well-being but those patients as
well. This is a controversial topic because of the issue of the unsafe nurse to patients ratios and
how an issue is supposed to be addressed when there is already an issue of a nurse having too
many patients, and at what point who is responsible. The hospital? The staff themselves? The
ones who wrote the regulations? No one wants to take the blame and downfall for the issue, but
no one also sees the effect it is having on the staff. No one is talking about the toll that this issue
is playing on the nursing that are working during these issues. Is this the reason there is a nursing
shortage because the people who are qualified quit because of the unsafe conditions creating a
bigger issue or is a simple fact of the schooling required and no one has the heart or drive for the
career anymore. Another thing that could be effecting it that are people scared off from the
career path because of the things they see in the news such Covid-19, Influenzas A & B, and
Monkeypox. Are people afraid in general and that is contributing to a fear of the healthcare
profession. Is it because nurses are seeing an increase in death due to the unsafe patient to nurse
rations, and they do not want to be apart of that. All of these things could be contributing to the
cause and effect in the healthcare profession. With all of this being said I want to job shadow a
nurse and interview other nurses to get their own personal input of what’s going on, and how
they feel about their own career choice and if it is truly something I want to continue on post-
graduation. If I am able to find one. I would also like to interview a nurse who was committed to
the career for a long period of time and who has recently left her profession and get her input on
why she left. Was it due to personal reasons, like raising a family, a family emergency, a change
in heart, a change in location, or due to everything that is going on in the medical field. Anything
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could have caused it. I want to get to the source to figure out this pressing issue in a field that I
want to go into one day.
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References
AP;, C. P. G. (n.d.). Nursing workload and patient safety-A human factors engineering
perspective. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Retrieved March 1, 2023,
from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21328758/

Research shows safe staffing saves lives. New York State Nurses Association. (n.d.). Retrieved
March 1, 2023, from https://www.nysna.org/experience-and-research-show-safe-staffing-
ratios-work-0#.ZAAUOXbMLGI