During the Association of California Nurse Leaders Innovation (ACNL) in Nursing Education Day, we polled nurse leaders to understand their perspective on embracing groundbreaking solutions, and the upsides and drawbacks of implementing them. Do your team’s opinions align with theirs? Find out now.
Every day, nurse leaders are presented with solutions to solve their problems and save money, and we are one of them. Challenges around ensuring adequate nurse staffing are not only a big problem, but present the greatest operational challenge facing health system today, and the misallocation of nurses is the #1 threat to patient safety and access to healthcare.
Rather than telling the ACNL nurse leaders more about a problem that they are already dealing with on a daily basis, we decided to hear from them what is happening with their nurse staffing challenges, what are the challenges, and what are they doing about it now, or considering doing about it, and what are the barriers to change. Because that’s where Medecipher is here to help.
What are the top 3 challenges regarding nurse staffing in your organization?
Additional discussion points:
- Leave of absences and call-ins remain an issue, not budgeting or scheduling for these predictable absences
- “We’re all competing with each other for the same labor resources”, including premium pay
Which of the following nurse staffing strategies has your organization attempted/utilized in the past year, or is considering trying in the next year?
Additional Discussion Points:
- The most common strategy is utilizing a float pool, either creating one, or expanding operations and regionalizing efforts (e.g. multiple hospitals in a system contributing to a regional float pool)
- Access for associate degree nurses into magnet systems
What barriers does your organization face when considering solutions that can rectify the situation?
Additional Discussion Points:
- ROI is clear and yet there is still no budget. Discussion about hard ROI (save money or make money metrics) vs. solutions that offer “soft ROI”.