Discuss the purpose of conducting an organizational needs assessment. What needs

Discuss the purpose of conducting an organizational needs assessment. What needs have you identified in your practicum setting? What tools did you utilize to determine that need? What will the focus of your project be? The purpose of conducting an organizational needs assessment is to find the gaps in efficiency and help determine what needs to be done to reach the overall goals of the organization. A needs assessment is a power indicator for decision-making, resource allocation, and strategic planning for the future growth of a healthcare organization. In my practicum setting over the last two weeks, it has been clear that staffing improvements and interprofessional strategic workforce action planning are needed to create nursing efficiencies. Patient throughput from the ED to the inpatient setting is very inefficient, with the primary cause being short staffing. The organization in which I’m doing my practicum uses the WISN model along with the SMART strategy for staffing decisions. The Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) method contributes to the analyses and decision-making process to allocate the number of professionals in the right place, at the right time, in order to meet the need of the patient population (Bonfim et al., 2022). Together with the SMART structure the objective to staff appropriately keeps the project moving forward and helps hold leaders accountable for what they have set out to accomplish. The focus of my project during my practicum is to come up with an evidence-based nurse staffing improvement strategy that is financially achievable and relevant to patient flow along with reducing nursing burnout. The current state the organization is in with short staffing has a huge impact on their inability to offload patients in the emergency room because they can’t admit the current emergency patients to the inpatient side. The volume of boarding patients has directly linked to the nurse staffing issue. Creating a staffing strategy to onboard more nursing positions supported by the WISN method will improve nursing satisfaction due to more resources and improve patient outcomes due to more nurses providing safe and effective care. Bonfim, D., Mafra, A., Palacio, D., & Rewa, T. (2022). Assessment of staffing needs for registered nurses and licensed practical nurses at primary care units in Brazil using Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) method. Human Resource Health. 19(1) 1-10. https://human-resources-health.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12960-021-00674-0