What are the best practices for nursing retention?
Are you a nurse? Are you looking for a job? I know I have put myself in that boat many times over the past 6 years. Trying to stay committed to one facility can be very hard. Per Forbes magazine with a survey of 100,000 employees, nursing was considered the 3rd unhappiest job in the United States. Nurses are feeling over worked, emotionally exhausted, and under paid. The cost of nursing turnover in hospitals is substantial. The cost of a replacing a single nurse is $62,000. This expense is calculated by the amount for: new nurse orientation, the cost of proctors to train the new staff, the overtime worked by staff, the cost of advertising for the hospital, and other factors. How do hospitals cause a paradigm shift and make nursing the 3rd happiest job in the United States? What factors do nurses consider important in job satisfaction? These questions have to be answered for many reasons: better patient safety, staffing moral, organizational loyalty, increased continuity of care, decrease cost of training nurses, and many other reasons.
This has been a burning passion of mine for many years. Over the years I’ve seen some of the best nurses stop practicing for a multitude of reasons: burn out, bullying, lack of resources, and job dissatisfaction just to name a few. I did all the training of new staff for my department and was always interested in the four stages of Reality Shock. Seeing nurses get out of their “honeymoon phase” and into the Reality Shock phase is scary. I also recently got promoted to Specialty Nursing Manger, which entails hiring nurses for the entire hospital. You would think seeing nursing turnover at an all-time high would be good for me but that is not the best practice for patient outcomes. HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital...