Nurse burnout continues to hinder the healthcare system across care settings. Hospital margins are thinning, and allocating resources to nurse retention and engagement is imperative to offset the cost of losing nurses. The average cost of turnover for one bedside RN is $52,350 – which can add up to expenses between $6.6M-$10.5M, according to a recent retention and staffing report stating “each percent change in RN turnover will cost/save the average hospital an additional $380,600/year.” In skilled nursing facilities, regulated staffing levels will likely impact quality care scores and reimbursements in the future. Staffing and reducing turnover are top of mind for healthcare leaders everywhere, even more so as they continue to look ahead to 2024.
Overcoming Nurse Burnout
While the industry challenge of nurse burnout is clear, the right approach to ease nurses’ burden is harder to decipher. Staffing leaders must balance competing priorities, such as investing in expensive agency labor versus racking up internal hours and offering nurses more flexibility to choose the best shifts while ensuring every shift is filled.
Three themes are among the top strategies to address nurse burnout: improving communication, increasing flexibility, and supplementing staff.
1. Improving Communication Between Nurses and Managers
Many organizations need help in traditional staffing workflows, tediously tracking multiple spreadsheets or using one-by-one phone calls or text messages to make scheduling adjustments and fill last-minute openings. This approach is not just time-consuming; it’s disruptive, siloed, and does not take advantage of widely accepted and expected technology.
With healthcare workforce software to deploy one-to-many communications, nurse leaders can post shifts, set rules for shift selection, and relay scheduling needs quickly – for example, by implementing a first-come, first-served open shift approach or shift bidding based on seniority or other factors. This respects nurses’ time and frees up time for nurse leaders to focus on their team’s growth and development, supporting operations, and improving patient care.
2. Giving Nurses More Flexibility
More shifts are not the answer to nurse burnout – but more scheduling options could be. With real-time scheduling available at their fingertips, nurses have the necessary flexibility. More choice empowers them to select schedule changes that best fit their work-life balance. It gives nurses the freedom to trade shifts or take on open shifts and makes them feel like they have control over their schedule, motivating them to do their best work.
Greater scheduling flexibility can reduce the likelihood of no-shows or call-outs and reengage nurses in their work, preventing turnover. Meanwhile, nurse leaders can ensure these individual choices are made with commitment rules in mind by defining scheduling rules that make their staffing software work with their team’s unique needs.
3. Supplementing Staff with Agency Nurses
For some healthcare leaders, agency staff can be an expensive response to reducing burnout and attrition. However, it could be the more affordable option in the long run. Compared to the cost of losing a nurse and the time it takes to hire a new nurse, the investment in supplemental agency staff could greatly outweigh the costs of staff turnover. If managed well, agency staff becomes an extension of the team – used as needed, but not the immediate response to every open shift.
At the core of all these decisions is data and using available technology. Schedulers must have confidence in who is doing what, when it’s happening, and where it’s taking place. Clear, at-a-glance staffing data differentiates between taking a one-size-fits-all approach and making appropriate staffing adjustments based on an organization’s most significant contributors to burnout and resignations.
Accessible staffing data revenue objectives and organizational goals empower healthcare leaders to take a holistic approach. They can weigh their options and resources from a united front and choose investments to target specific challenges while understanding the impact this may have on another aspect of the organization.
Smarter Planning Leads to Reduced Stress, Higher Satisfaction
While there are many options to address nurse burnout, one thing is clear: better staffing management is necessary. In fact, 57% of nurses planning to leave the workforce would reconsider returning to their position if their workplace implemented a more flexible approach to scheduling and shift management.
With data and a smart workforce management solution, staffing leaders can make thoughtful, more informed choices that fluctuate seamlessly with day-to-day, real-time scheduling needs. Nurses can impact their schedule and sign up for shifts that give them the best work-life balance through technology customized for their practice. Managers can refocus their time to make strategic staffing decisions. And ultimately, patients get high-quality, uninterrupted care.
Join Kaiser Permanente for a free webinar, “Increasing Nurse Retention, Engagement, and Certification Pass Rates in a Post-Pandemic World,” on Tuesday, June 13 at 2 pm EST. Register here.
Discover how healthcare organizations are putting solutions in place to address nurse burnout and retention in the post-pandemic era.
Join us as we delve into the success story of Kaiser Permanente’s Nurse Scholars Academy. Learn how their partnership with Springer Publishing transformed nurse career development, leading to significant benefits.
Speakers include:
Stacy Hull MS, RN, CCNS Clinical Practice Consultant NCAL Kaiser Permanente Regional Office
Stacy Hull MS, RN, CCNS, CCNS Regional Clinical Practice for KP Practice Excellence, Clinical Education and Effectiveness. Hull is a UCSF School of Nursing graduate as a Cardiovascular Clinical Nurse Specialist.
Luis Perez, MNA Consultant V for KP Nurse Scholars Academy
Luis Perez, MNA, Consultant V for KP Nurse Scholars Academy, has over a decade of healthcare experience and earned a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco.
Jim D’Alfonso DNP, RN, PhD (h), FNAP, FAAN Regional Executive Director Professional Excellence and KP Scholars Academy
Jim D’Alfonso DNP, RN, PhD (h), FNAP, FAAN, Regional Executive Director Professional Excellence, and KP Scholars Academy. Graduate and Faculty at USF and Associate Editor of Nursing Administration Quarterly.
Janet Sohal, DNP, RN, NEA-BC Regional Director of KP Nurse Scholars Academy
Janet Sohal, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, Regional Director of KP Nurse Scholars Academy. Caritas Coach and HeartMath Trainer. Graduate of USF with her doctorate in nursing practice.
Benson Yeung, DNP, RN NEA-BC, CHSE, Regional Director Patient Care Services, Clinical Education and Effectiveness, Adjunct Faculty and President of Betta Gamma Chapter of Sigma at USF.
Don’t miss out on this valuable insight, and register today!
The COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly one of the most trying and difficult things that many of us have had to endure in our lives. Nearly everything we care about was disrupted from child care to going to work to visiting friends and family. Many became socially isolated, even more are dealing with stress and anxiety from the virus. To some degree, all of our economy was impacted, with many businesses still struggling to reopen and many employees cautious about their options moving forward.
With all of the crazy things that COVID brought into the lives of everyday people, it can be hard to realize the even more significant toll it has had on health care providers, particularly nurses. Nurses have been on the front lines of the pandemic since the beginning and most have been put into situations that nobody outside of the profession can imagine. Understandably many are dealing with burnout and ready to leave nursing altogether.
One recent report from Business Insider stated: “Many nurses on the front lines of the pandemic are burned out and mentally and emotionally tired. A significant portion of nurses in a Trusted Health survey said they were considering a new career. Of those who said they felt less committed to nursing, 25% were looking for a new job or planning to retire.”
This high rate of burnout and apathy are concerning and ultimately beg the question: What are hospital administrators to do?
Put Trauma Care Front and Center
Our nurses have seen a lot this past year. Many have been put into positions where hospitals were at capacity and whole units had been converted to treating COVID patients, yet it still wasn’t enough. Supplies became limited and many watched as an uncountable number of patients died without the comfort of family from a disease most people knew nothing about and couldn’t do much to treat.
That kind of trauma is typically reserved for horrific places such as war zones.
Yet our nurses showed up day after day to care for the sick. Some gave up going home to their families for months to protect them from the virus. Others faced prejudice for “risking the lives of others” by going to the grocery store after a shift. Sooner or later, it is all enough to break a person.
One survey conducted by the International Council of Nurses laid out the serious mental and physical health impacts that the pandemic is having on nursing professionals. Perhaps the single best thing that hospitals can do to support their nurses is to provide on-site, free mental health support and treatment. This type of initiative could give nurses an outlet and help them work through some of the difficulties they have faced in the past year.
Assist with In-Hospital Moves
Unfortunately, regardless of the support and treatment options that become available, many nurses have still seen too much and will leave. Though COVID-19 has pushed many strong-willed nurses past the breaking point, a significant number were there already. Even before COVID, there were plenty of legitimate reasons that good nurses left the bedside for other opportunities.
In these instances, it may be possible for hospitals to help keep quality people on staff just in a different position. For example, perhaps a nurse would be willing to stay but in a more administrative role. Moving into something such as medical billing and coding could allow them to continue to serve the community they care about but shield them from the traumas the stress brought on by the pandemic.
Hospital administrators can also help nurses who don’t want to be at the bedside any longer move up into more specialized nursing roles. Some nurses may be willing to stay on staff with the promise that they won’t have to interact with COVID patients and can, instead, focus on specific diseases like GERD and provide the medication and treatment help with them.
Focus on Work-Life Balance
For those nurses who do stay, we can hope that mental health counseling and treatment will be available when needed. We can also hope that there will be a renewed focus on work-life balance from hospital administrative staff.
During the pandemic, many nurses were encouraged, if not forced, to work longer shifts or to pick up extra days. Unfortunately, once again, this behavior wasn’t exactly uncommon before the pandemic. It just became more apparent. Being overworked and underappreciated in this manner can lead to extremely high rates of burnout and ultimately more turnover, a less productive workforce, and a negative culture that permeates the entire workspace.
There are about a thousand studies out there that explain the incredible benefits of a strong work-life balance. These positives can range from significant improvements in personal mental and physical health to increases in workplace productivity, retention, and satisfaction. Though there is an undeniable need to fill a shortage of nurses, treatment of the folks already working should be paramount.
***
The bottom line here is that our nurses have worked hard to do what they can to protect our nation during a global pandemic. Now, they need help. Changes that hospital administrators can make to help curb the number of nurses leaving are not necessarily small and easy ones, but they are critical to the long-term care of some of the most important caregivers.
See Our Champions of Nursing Diversity
Sign up now to get your free digital subscription to Minority Nurse
