Recent Articles
What do you think of prescribed color-coded scrubs?
A Minneapolis-based hospital group will soon implement color-coded uniform requirements so that patients and family members can easily identify nurses from other hospital workers. This requirement has been causing some controversy among nurses nationally. Many argue that their brightly colored scrubs cheer up patients; the solid colored scrubs lack individuality and are depressing. What do you think?
Drive New Patients to Your Hospital with Social Media
Approximately 3,087 social networking accounts are currently ran by hospitals. But why would health care facilities be interested in Facebook or Twitter? Hospitals have found that social media helps them learn what patients, physicians and businesses are saying about their facility. This, in turn, helps them better policies and processes.
The most advantageous social media benefit hospitals recognize is the ability to draw in new patients. Consumers are relying less on word-of-mouth referrals and looking more to social-media channels to choose the kinds of products and services they use—including health care. After seeing this, hospitals have geared a large portion of their marketing to social media campaigns.
Web traffic on the majority of hospital web sites has risen exponentially for those that use social media. Social media impacts nearly 40% of recent hospital or urgent-care center patients with more than half of 25-to-34 year olds reporting they are influenced by it, according to a recent report from Ad-ology.
Still not convinced? Here is an article about 20 hospitals with inspiring social media strategies that have changed their facility tremendously.
Hospitals Exploring New Well-Being Programs
Most hospitals currently implement well-being programs for their staff. Recently, more and more have been expanded beyond the traditional health and wellness offerings and are now addressing mental and emotional health, financial health, work-life effectiveness and workplace environment and stress. With this new integration, many already see measureable and positive results which have impacted employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity. You can read more on the subject here.
What types of well-being programs does your organization offer?
Student’s Answer to Becoming a Travel Nurse
Medical Solutions Student Guide to Travel Nursing
For all those aspiring travel nurses out there! We’ve designed a new easy-to-follow Student Guide to Travel Nursing for those students wanting to chose travel nursing as career. The student guide details information on the required education, experience and necessary skills to become a successful travel nurse. Please pass this on to any students interested in choosing travel nursing as a career path.
It is currently posted on the Medical Solutions website and is also available in a printable version.
How Do You Create an Effective Hospital Culture?
It’s proven that hospitals with an effective culture provide better patient care and outperform competitors. To achieve a desired hospital culture, you must identify what kind of culture you currently have, decide what you want your culture to be, and shift everyone toward the preferred culture.
The easiest way to assess current culture is to simply observe. How does your staffing act? Are they respectful toward higher authority? Do they have the patient’s best interest in mind? How is the temporary staff being treated? Look for common conduct and visible signs. Listen to what your nurses, doctors and patients are telling you. Read reviews of your hospitals. Surveys. And more surveys. Performing initial in-depth surveys for patients is the easiest way to evaluate your culture. Then, continue to conduct follow-up surveys to evaluate progress. These will all give you an idea of what your current hospital culture is like.
What did you learn from your observations? Did you find that your hospital values safely, effective care, respecting the dignity of all who come through your doors? If you said yes to all these, then your hospital is on the right track. If not, then you certainly have some work to do. From here, you can decide what you like about your current culture and, of course, what you need to change.
Things to strive for in a hospital culture:
- Ensuring patient safety
- Attitude of teamwork and open communication
- Equality of staff
- Comfortability in reporting potential hazards without fear of reprimanding
After you’ve decided on a solid hospital culture, it’s now time to move your staffing in that direction. This is definitely a difficult task in the healthcare staffing world with a plethora of temporary staffing and travel nurses coming and going. These are some steps to start with:
- Have a staff meeting. Clearly communicate the culture to your employees and the results you’d like to achieve, and then over communicate and remind them daily.
- Have fun with it by providing incentives for complying with the hospital culture.
- Make the staff feel like they are personally responsible for the successfulness of the hospital.
- Be the leader! The culture will not survive if the authority is not setting the example
Keep it up. Your culture isn’t something you start and then ignore. A strong culture is a result of care and enforcement. How do you know that you are progressing in the right direction? Go back to step 1. Observe, listen and survey. Hopefully you will see the progression from where you started.
Remember you can create the idea of the culture you want, but only your staff can make it a reality.
LinkedIn, are you using it to recruit?
LinkedIn has become the #1 social media network among recruiters, with over 120 million members. With it’s easy search of keywords, skills, specialties and recommendations, it alleviates a lot of the previous steps to finding the right candidate.
Are your recruiters using it to search for potential healthcare staff?
What is your hospital doing to keep nurses happy?
With the current nurse shortage, it’s no surprise that hospitals should be doing all they can to keep their nurses happy.
Maintaining an environment where the nurse wants to work is critical for not only nurse retention, but also patient quality. The overall stress accompanied by an uncomfortable and disrespectful work environment can send nurses running for the door. The key is finding out what makes nurses happy enough to stay.
The Nursing Organizations Alliance developed a set of principles to help hospitals and other health care entities create positive work environments. More than 40 nurse organizations have endorsed these principles. So, what are you doing to keep your nurses happy?
What do you do to combat physical nurse fatigue?
A recent survey by the American Nurses Association looked at the physical toll that being a nurse can impose on a person. Some of the more alarming things it found were that 80% of nurses say therey continue to work frequently even though they had neck, back or shoulder pain caused on the job and that 74% of respondents are concerened with the acute or chronic effects of stess and overwork and 62% were concerened with disabling muscoskeletal injury.
Of course the effects that fatigue can have on patient care are well documented, but it is still a challenge for many hospitals to find ways to reduce it for their staff.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this and what you do about it in your unit? Take this poll to tell us what you think (pick all that apply).
Our top 10 most popular healthcare staffing posts
It’s years end coming up soon, so it seems like a good time to look at the most popular posts have been over the past year.
10. How are you dealing with a more diverse nurse population?
This article looked at the results of a nurse population study that had interesting results in relation to the amount of racial, gender and age diversity in the nurse population.
9. Easy ways for nurses to de-stress and avoid burnout
This post discusses an article that lists 22 ways for nurses to de-stress and prevent nurse burnout.
8. Full time nurse labor costs versus travel nurses
In this post we discussed the KPMG study that looked at the overall cost of full-time nurses and discussed their findings.
7. Overtime and hospital staff burnout
This post provides a list of resources to help Nurse Managers spot and respond to nurse staff burnout.
6. Mentoring Programs designed to keep nurses, young and old.
The subject of this post is about the value that putting a mentoring program in place can have on retaining nurses and improving patient care.
5. 14 questions to ask yourself about your nurse recruitment plan
This post lists 14 key questions that hospitals need to ask about their nurse recruitment plan in order to make improvements in their hiring.
4. Phone interview questions to make sure travel nurses will be a cultural fit
The purpose of this post is to list resources that Nurse Managers and Hospital Hiring Managers can use to ensure that the travel nurses they bring in are a good cultural fit at the hospital and in the unit.
3. Evaluating a Healthcare Staffing Company’s Cost
Here we explain the best way for hospitals to compare the costs of travel nursing companies they work with.
2. Build your best nursing unit
In this post we discuss things that Nurse Managers can do during tough economic times to get the most out of their units.
1. Improve your nursing staff morale
This post talks about our 7 Steps to Better Nursing Morale ebook, a poplar handbook we made on how Nurse Managers can improve the morale of nurses in their unit to prevent burnout.
What hospital executives think of temporary nurse staffing
In a round up of a panel at this year’s recent Healthcare Staffing Summit three healthcare executives’ opinions on the use of temporary nurse staffing were discussed. Two of the three do use travel nurses and other temporary staffing while the third didn’t, but their concerns were interesting to hear.
From reading what they had to say it seems like there is still a sense of failure associated with being “forced” to rely on travel nursing companies to meet vacancies instead of seeing their use as part of an overall strategic staffing plan.
It was nice to see that the quality of travel nurses is n0t so much in question anymore, at least wth this group. Linda Aiken’s research into this pointed out that the quality of temporary nurses is not any less than permanent nurses at a facility and that is also what this group said they have seen.
They also discussed the KPMG study that looked at the perception that temporary nurses are more expensive than a staff nurse and how it opened their eyes to some cost factors they hadn’t considered. That is a good sign because the overall goal is having enough nurses to ensure patient care and having temporary nurses seen as an investement and not an expense is vital. Especially in light of the increased demand for nurses that healthcare reform is going to result in, which they also discussed.
To read the whole discussion click here: Healthcare Staffing Leaders Speak Out
