Solutions for your Nursing Retention Problem (Part 1)
By: Allison Rein
Nursing shortage remains a critical problem in Canada’s health system. Nurses are critical to patient safety and patient care within a hospital, and while the pandemic may have moved forward and news articles no longer cover the shortage, hospitals have yet to recover.
As a former Intensive Care Unit Registered Nurse who left nursing to obtain an MBA and now working in the Health Technology sector, I am well positioned to comment on a handful of ways hospitals can address their nursing shortage. The recommendations come from personal experience, research and onsite analysis of nurses needs.
Top Recommendations:
Assign a senior hospital leader to every unit within the hospital. Nurses feel hugely disconnected from leadership and believe there is no way for them to impact leadership. Furthermore, they believe leadership doesn’t understand their needs. By forming connections between front line staff and decision makers, frontline staff are empowered to influence their leaders, and leaders are able to ensure they truly understand clinician’s need.
Recognition. This has been all over the news in the last two years as businesses struggle with transitioning back to the office, but it’s the same in healthcare. Hospitals frequently have no formal or informal recognition for clinicians. Hospitals should establish both a peer-to-peer recognition system, as well as a leadership-clinician recognition system.
Improved communication throughout the hospital. I’ve found many hospitals have great initiatives related to education funding and ways for staff to share feedback, however, staff frequently don’t know about these. From my experience, only about 15% of clinicians read emails within one week of receiving them. This means that clinicians remain unaware of ongoing initiatives and changes, and then feel surprised and blindsided when change comes. To overcome this, communications teams need to design communications that reach nurses, and emails / newsletters / posting on the website, may not be enough.
While these three initiatives seem straightforward, putting them in place is likely to have tangible effects on nursing retention and nursing morale. Beyond these three initiatives, there are so many more initiatives hospitals can consider, but we’ll save those for another blog post.
Have you seen something similar in your workplace? If so, leave a comment below! We’d love to hear about it!
