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Make your travel nurses feel welcome

By Jeff on Jul 22, 2011 in Healthcare Staffing Innovation

Recent news and research has shown that travel nursing is steadily returning to pre-recession levels, which means more and more your hospital will be able to be less choosy and in a more competitive mode to get the best travel nurses. This makes it important for you to make a good impression on them as they arrive and work for you. Word spread fasts in the traveler world about what hospitals are travel nurse friendly. So what can you do?

Well one easy thing to do is simply provide a welcome package for your travelers. This will make them feel more at home and welcomed at the same time. Here are just some ideas for things you could include in a welcome package:

A gift certificate to a nice local restaurant
A city coupon book
Some branded gifts like notepads, t-shirts, ink pens, etc.
Food from a local vendor
Put it all in a branded bag
A traveler version of your hospital orientation handbook

The key is that these do not have to be expensive items and the main goal is to look at using travel nurses as part of your overall nurse hiring strategy, not just as a reaction to unplanned need.

Alphabet staffing?

By Jeff on May 01, 2009 in Featured, Healthcare Staffing Innovation, Hospital Staffing

Over at HospitalImpact.org was a great post about emotionally intelligent patient care using DISC personality profiles (Dominant, Influential, Steady, Conscientious). The thought of personality types in a hospital unit is intriguing for a couple of reasons.

The first being the impact on patient care on an individual basis and being able to recognize what your patients are, which Nick Jacobs’ post talks about.

But it is also interesting to look at it from an intra-unit teamwork aspect. When building a team you have two choices, build it by design or build it by chance. I would prefer to build it by design and by evaluating my current staff and their personality types when I hire new staff I can look for someone who not only meets the clinical requirements for the job, but who also rounds out my unit and/or meshes well with our existing strengths and weaknesses. For example, if I were running an imaging unit I may already have a “Conscientious” X-ray tech “Steady” MRI tech and need to round it out with an “Influential” Ultrasound tech.

It is used in other industries and is definitely something that healthcare providers could use to determine the what kind of patient care a nurse may give or the attention to detail of a tech. Here are some good resources that explain how the DISC personality profiles work.

ChangingMinds.org
ProfilesGlobal.com