One of the issues within my organization that I have for work that remains unresolved is assigning patients to nurses based on acuity. This problem is ongoing within the hospital and no one has been able to find a reasonable solution on how to fix it. As this problem increased, the hospital faced several challenges due to the unresolved unfair assignment done by the charge nurses. Favoritism has been identified as the root cause of this ongoing problem whereby the charge nurse favors some staff members with less severe patients over other staff members. As the hospital continues to face different challenges on a daily basis, such as staffing difficulties in different shifts and units, conflict between staff members, increase in sub-budget, in case a nurse does not agree or refuses to accept an assignment justified by other nurses that a particular nurse is assigned a high-acuity patient. In the event that the assignment complaint reaches the nursing director or manager, the nurse does not have the opportunity to have an individual discussion with the charge nurse to find out where the errors were made so that it can be made the correction future references. This type of case is usually considered as a patient abandonment if the case ever comes to the disciplinary committee meeting and the manager usually represents the charge nurse at the meeting and in most cases it is usually the charge nurse against the 'nurse because of his authoritative type of leadership within the company. Because of this continued unfair assignment, many employees have been fired or disciplined when they spoke out about their assignment. Another incident where patient severity ratios have been an issue is when nurses are transferred to a different unit than the regular one. Whenever a nurse is transported to another unit, they are assigned to that unit's most acute patient and
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