Tag: "Featured"

Drive New Patients to Your Hospital with Social Media
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Drive New Patients to Your Hospital with Social Media

By Jeannie on Mar 30, 2012 in Healthcare Staffing, healthcare staffing social media, Hospitals with Social Media

medical social media 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.

 

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Medical Solutions Student Guide to Travel Nursing
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Student’s Answer to Becoming a Travel Nurse

By Jeannie on Feb 16, 2012 in How to become a travel nurse, student guide to travel nursing, Travel Nurses
tng200x300 Students 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.

 

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How Do You Create an Effective Hospital Culture?
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How Do You Create an Effective Hospital Culture?

By Jeannie on Feb 10, 2012 in Featured, Healthcare Staffing Tweets, hospital culture, Hospital Staffing, Travel Nurses, Uncategorized

iStock 000019180736XSmall 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.

 

 

 

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LinkedIn, are you using it to recruit?

By Jeannie on Feb 03, 2012 in Featured, Healthcare Hiring, Healthcare Staffing, Travel Nurses

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?

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What is your hospital doing to keep nurses happy?

By Jeannie on Jan 20, 2012 in Featured, Healthcare Staffing, Patient Experience, Travel Nurses, Working with Staffing Vendors

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?

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Full time nurse labor costs versus travel nurses

By Jeff on Jun 24, 2011 in Healthcare Staffing, Hospital Economics

iStock 000015338069XSmall Full time nurse labor costs versus travel nursesA recent study done by KPMG looked at hospital labor costs. More specifically it looked at the overall cost of full-time nurses and the surveyed hospitals use of per diem or traveling nurses.

Here is a summary of their findings:

  • All-in cost of full-time hospital nurses is an average $98 thousand per year (or $45 per hour). This assumes 100 percent productivity.
  • Base wages on average represent 75 percent of fully loaded payroll and 57 percent of all-in cost. The remaining balance is made up of things like payroll tax, shift differential costs, overtime pay, holiday pay and paid time off, bonuses, pension contributions, and other costs.
  • Besides base wages, other elements of the all-in cost include payroll tax, shift differential, and insurance, as well as costs such as holiday/paid time off, overtime, and training.
  • There seem to be important additional “hidden” costs with nursing labor that are related to full-time nurses, but are difficult to quantify.
  • About 66% of survey respondents use of traveling or per diem nurses currently with the main reasons being the quality of the travel nurses available and supply and demand.
  • A 90:10 ratio of full-time employed nurses to traveling or other temporary nurses was seen as the ideal ratio on average.

You can read the press release about it here or see all the results here.

Their findings further prove the value of the Staffing Cost Calculator that we developed here at Medical Solutions over two years ago. Our tool is an interactive way to directly compare the costs of a full-time nurse versus a traveler and also takes into consideration factors like nurse to patient ratios and the costs of nurse burnout.

You can download the Staffing Cost Calculator here. If you have questions contact your Medical Solutions Client Manager at 1-866-633-3548.

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It’s Nurses Week! Don’t forget to tell your staff they rock!

By Jeff on May 06, 2011 in Nursing Staff Management

iStock 000016335577XSmall Its Nurses Week! Dont forget to tell your staff they rock!It’s that one week out of the year where nurses are celebrated they way should be celebrated all year. Or at least it supposed to be.

Over the years Nurses Week has stirred up mixed feelings among nurses about whether or not it is an honor or demeaning, but in the end it is just so important to recognize them for all they do to keeping us all healthy and alive.

What are you doing at your hospital to tell your nurses they rock? Or in your unit?

And don’t forget to check out our Nurses Rock! Nurses Week T-Shirt Design Challenge.

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Improve the travel nurse experience at your hospital with two simple questions

By Jeff on Apr 22, 2011 in Healthcare Staffing, Hospital Staffing, Travel Nurses

iStock 000016256634XSmall Improve the travel nurse experience at your hospital with two simple questions

We recently discussed how important it is to have a travel nurse friendly hospital and how an anti-travel nurse culture gets started. Now we are going to discuss one of the easiest ways to improve the experience for travelers at your hospital, whether it is a already a good one you want to make better or a bad one that needs improved.

Instituting a simple two question exit interview with the travelers you work with based on Net Promoter Score (NPS) system is a great way to gauge the experience travelers have in your hospital.

Using this system you ask two questions:

  1. On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend this hospital to a fellow travel nurse?
  2. Why did you give that score?

The beauty of the NPS system is its simplicity. Think of it like a pain chart. Anything above 8 are considered Promoters, anything below 7 is considered a Detractor and 7 and 8 are neutral.

picture2 Improve the travel nurse experience at your hospital with two simple questions

You obviously want all of them to be Promoters, but the real value is in the why. By evaluating the why answers you will be able to see trends and make improvements in the traveler culture at your hospital.

You can do this either in person, on the phone or automated through email, but how you do it is not nearly as important as what you do the information once you have it.

You can learn a lot more about NPS here: NetPromoter.com

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Nurses Rock! Nurses Week T-Shirt Design Challenge

By Jeff on Apr 12, 2011 in Medical Solutions Staffing News

BannerAd 300x2501 Nurses Rock! Nurses Week T Shirt Design ChallengeNurses Week is just around the corner and we wanted to let everyone know that 2nd Annual Nurses Week T-Shirt Design Challenge started today.

This year the contest is going to be even better. The prizes are bigger and we have a new a partner in the contest, scrubadoo.com. They are pitching in $10 towards new scrubs for each participant who submits an approved design, so everyone wins.

The contest winners will be chosen based on a combination of votes at Fibers.com and a panel of judges from all three sponsoring companies.

The Grand Prize for the contest is an Apple iPad 2, $100 gift card to scrubadoo.com and $100 gift card to Fibers.com, plus one shirt of the winning design.

Click here to enter and learn more about the contest and the other prizes you can win: Nurses Rock! Nurses Week T-Shirt Design Challenge

Tell your staffs. Join as a team. Use our platform to host your own mini contest.

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Why it's important for hospitals to be travel nurse friendly

By Jeff on Apr 01, 2011 in Hospital Staffing, Travel Nurses

iStock 000015274175XSmall Why it's important for hospitals to be travel nurse friendlyIf you already have a traveler friendly hospital or unit and understand how important that is to offering great patient care then you don’t need to read this article. But if you are not sure where your culture falls on the traveler friendly scale then maybe the three minutes to read this may be worth your time.

How an anti-travel nurse culture starts 

No hospital or unit within it would intentionally set out to have an anti-traveler culture, instead what happens more often is that efforts just are not made to build a traveler friendly culture and more ambivalent approach is taken in which travelers are seen as either a necessary evil or as just a temporary fix and not part of an overall personnel strategy. When this attitude is taken by the leadership it can also trickle down to the nurses on staff who either consciously or unconsciously pass it on during their interactions with the travel staff.

How word of an anti-travel nurse culture spreads

In travel nursing forums it is not uncommon to see discussions about hospitals that travelers had bad experiences at. This is an unfortunate thing to see. Not only for the traveler who rightly or wrongly felt they were treated in an anti-traveler manner during an assignment, but also for the hospital, because they may have just lowered their chances of getting the best travel nurses to come and work at their facility.

Travel nurses are often members of communities and participants in forums online  such as:

It is in those environments where bad experiences are shared and bad reviews of their time at your hospital are discovered by other nurses who may be interested in working in there. So now even though a hospital may work with good travel nursing companies who recruit good nurses, offer a high rate that allows for a traveler to be paid well and is located in in a great area that nurses would love to live in for a few months, all of those benefits may be overshadowed by what is said about that hospital online.

How an anti-travel nurse culture gets worse

Once a culture that is unfriendly towards travelers has taken root in a hospital a viscous cycle can be created that just makes the culture less traveler friendly with every assignment. It goes something like this:

Anti Travel Nurse Cycle Why it's important for hospitals to be travel nurse friendly

How an anti-travel nurse culture affects your hospital

As we just discussed, in the immediate, having a culture that is not traveler friendly is going to impact the quality of travelers you are able to attract to your hospital. It will also negatively impact the effectiveness of the travelers that work in your hospital by creating tense environments between travel staff and perm nurses where effective teamwork can be compromised. And of course poor teamwork can have a direct impact on the level of patient care you are able to provide, which is never a good thing for anyone involved.

How to fix it if your hospital has an anti-travel nurse culture

The first thing to do is to take a step back and look objectively at your own and your hospital or unit’s culture toward travelers. Ask any travelers you currently have working or contact previous ones to see what their experience at your facility is/was like. Once you know where you stand you will be able to go forward to make improvements.

Here are some previous Healthcare Staffing Blog posts that offer advice on creating a positive experience for travel nurses and the benefits of doing so.

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