Respond to your colleagues by providing additional thoughts about competing needs that may impact your colleagues’ selected issues, or additional ideas for applying policy to address the impacts described.

For a policy to be developed in nursing, both the competing needs and the agenda must align. For example, during the beginning stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, many students and trainees were going to be potentially involved in the care of infectious patients. Due to the virus, there was a huge probability that the students and trainees would be exposed, and the need to conserve the personal protective equipment (PPE) outweighed the need to provide an education to these students and trainees during this time (Gallagher & Schleyer, 2020). So, policies were made to stop and remove students and trainees from the hospitals. When the hospitals made this new policy, they inadvertently also created a shortage in workers, requiring many of them to work overtime, as well as created and increasing the risk for burnout on the existing staff. The new policy created will affect patients, because many of the hospital workers are overstressed and perhaps, less trained or qualified to care for the patient.

Sometimes a policy may seem to present a positive benefit, but have a negative impact on patients or even sometimes the workforce. According to Nancarrow (2015), what would work best is a flexible workforce, which has the potential to optimize our healthcare accessibility. A flexible workforce is one that can promptly respond to labor shortages and distribution of resources in an efficient way so that the needs of the staff and patients are met (Nancarrow, 2015). Resuming the training of new hires and students and starting up a residency program would help out the workforce shortage and ease some of the healthcare burnout (Wildermuth, Weltin, & Simmons, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic is a chaotic time, but also a great time for educators. Educators can take this time to impart “strategies for improving end of life care, allocating scarce resources, and caring for patients who chose to be non-compliant during the self-quarantine recommendations (Gallagher & Schleyer, 2020).”