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Nurses have become in many respects the life-blood of an organization. Facilities make money based on patient volume. The patient’s decision to enter a specific hospital or clinic may be largely based on past experience and public perception as communicated by friends and associates. Given that most of a patient’s time is spent interacting with the nursing staff, a facility depends on its nurses to provide a satisfying patient encounter. MedREDY mandates its nurses to honor the patient with respect and compassion, ensuring fulfilled customers, which will lead to new and repeating business.
Nursing shortages may be one of the most significant challenges facilities face. The demand for nurses continues to grow:
- Hospitals have expanded, 80% report expanding capacity in the near future.
- Increasing competition among nursing employers such as ambulatory care clinics, nursing homes, community health centers, and home health agencies.
- Rising employment of nurse practitioners and physician assistants as hospitals look to contain the costs of physician labor.
Healthcare organizations need a partner who has the resources and systems in place to ensure they can sustainably operate in an environment of alarming shortages. The firms that will succeed will be the ones who partner with experts in the staffing field. We allow our clients to focus on patient care, while we focus on securing the talent to drive their revenue. By 2010 the number of nurses is expected to decline the first time in decades. The shortage range by 2020 is predicted to be between 400,000 and 1 million according to a study done by Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
Quality Concerns and Pay-For-Performance Reimbursement
Problem: Pay-for-performance reimbursement from Medicare and commercial health plans is a function of quality measures in clinical outcomes, process metrics, and patient satisfaction. Given that nurses outnumber physicians by 3 to 1, and most of a patients hospital experience results from interactions with nurses, the nurse has become a considerable influence on revenue generation. Nurses ensure that routine procedures are performed correctly, patients are monitored, data are recorded, medications are delivered correctly, and patients are comforted in their daily needs.
Starting 2008, CMS began publishing patient satisfaction surveys in response to the questions such as these:
- During this hospital stay, how often did nurses treat you with courtesy and respect?
- During this stay, how often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your plan?
The data collection was voluntary, however, non-participation resulted in a subtraction in the market basket update of 2.0 percentage points. In view of the recalibrated compensation amounts with the MS-DRGs, this deduction could be quite penal.
Solution:
MedREDY prequalifies and then further coaches it nursing staff to fully embrace their responsibilities as total caregivers. Our nurses have strong expertise in their given specialty, but also embrace their responsibilities as caregivers. They understand how critical the patient’s well-being is to a successful recovery. Through personalization and humanization, our nurse’s compassion leads fast recoveries, referred business, and the resulting direct effect on the hospital’s top and bottom lines.
(should we base the nurses compensation on a performance survey from hospital-would only really work in a travel scenario, could be problematic if patient’s are angry, but could make us more popular to our customers as we are matching risk and pay for performance)
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Nurse Dissatisfaction and Turnover
Problem: Overworked and overstressed nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. Unsatisfied nurses will hurt your patient satisfaction levels. Nurses who leave cause even more problems:
Lost revenue in not being able to maintain staffing ratios, while hurting the facility’s reputation in having to turn patients away.
Other staff is asked to do more on their shift while also having to work more hours, fueling discontent and targeting two of the top three factors of nursing dissatisfaction/turnover.
Solution:
Always have good nurses at the ready. Call us, or log on to your scheduling tool on our website, posting the positions you need filled. You just tell us what you need and we will execute. We will always prioritize nurses who have experience at your facility and who are in excellent standing. Instant access relieves you of the burden of overworking your existing staff or risk having to turn patients away, all while bolstering your patients’ confidence. Make human capital your strongest asset.
According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers Health Research Institute Survey, among factors for nurse dissatisfaction/turnover, reliance upon agency nurses ranked below the following factors:
- Excessive administrative paperwork
- Workload too heavy due to acuity levels
- Workload too heavy due to inadequate staff
- Inadequate compensation
- Disruptive physician behavior
- Inadequate preparation/training
- Lack of information technology support
- Not enough direct patient care activity
- Unpleasant or inefficient physical environment
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Scheduling/Flexibility
Problem: Nurses are demanding more flexibility in their schedules to accommodate greater time for their personal lives and family. However, you are understaffed and issuing overtime hours at great expense to the organization. Meanwhile human resources and the nursing manager dedicate exorbitant amounts of time and energy to recruiting, advertising, interviewing, and training new nurses, half of who, according to statics by the National League for Nursing and PWCs HRI, leave their first employer in the first two years. Compound that with 23% of US nurses saying they planned to leave their current job within the next year. The number for nurses under 30 years old is nearly one and half times as great at 33%.
Solution:
We offer an innovative solution that can alleviate much of the pain and uncertainty. Our online scheduling tools allow you to predict when staffing ratios will require accessing more personnel. The nursing manager can select the staff he or she wants and assign time slots that need coverage.
- Never overbook nurses with on demand staffing.
- Keep your workforce happy with flexible scheduling.
- Instant access to quality nurses.
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Conclusion - The Need For Nurses
Chief nurse executives and CEOs can agree that insufficient levels of quality nursing staff undercut a hospital’s capacity to provide patient care, while simultaneously thwarting the six aims for improving health care systems as advocated by the Institute of Medicine: safe, timely, efficient, equitable, effective, and patient-centered.
A number of studies indicate that a facility with low levels of RN staffing suffer greater risk of adverse patient outcomes and increased mortality. Nursing shortages directly contribute to 4 of the 8 conditions Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will no longer pay hospitals for the additional costs they incur: pressure ulcers, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, vascular catheter-associated infections, and preventable injuries such as fractures, dislocations, and burns. The occurrence of these conditions results in lost revenues and may also push up legal and risk management expenses, not to mention losing market share as patients seek alternative providers.
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