After reading The Impact of Facility Design on Patient Safety (Reiling, Hughes & Murphy 2008) I’ve decided to go with minimize fatigue of staff because I think this highly resonates to me and my co-workers at my workplace. Many of my co-workers have stated that the most reason they feel fatigue is due to lack of staffing. Many of us have to do overtime as we have to compensate for the lack of staffing. My facility hire new nurses, however they end up leaving after a month or two. Sometimes less than a week. This also goes for the workers that have worked there for years. Many of them have left and decided to work at a “better” facility. Considering the seven stages of the design process, I think in order to improve this matter, we need to go back to the identification stage. At this stage, we have to identify the reason as to why new nurses do not last long in this facility. Identification of the root of the problem is a good way to start solving the issue. To identify the problem, one can gather information such as asking the workers the reasons of why they are leaving. Several reasons I have gathered are due to lack of organization, low starting pay, no pay raise, or lack of staffing. After reviewing SCAMPER, I’m going to focus on the Modify or Magnify option. By modifying the system we can promote better staffing which can eliminate the work fatigue that many workers experiences at my facility. We can start by modifying the pay scale. Although this is up to the company and management, I think a higher pay scale would entice many workers to stay at the facility. With this, more staffing would be present thus it will also eliminate lack of organization. Consistent workers can provide patients a steady, continuous, and coordinated care. This project would be in the reliability hierarchy of design. In this way one can measure the effectiveness of the suggested solutions. How reliable can these solutions be? How stable will it be? Can it improve staffing thus decreasing the fatigue of the staffs? By addressing the problem of lack of staffing can highly decrease work fatigue, if solved.
