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Four ideas to Improve Hospital Staff Management |
Finance and nursing have different perspectives and priorities for hospital-information technology. This is particularly evident in the evaluation of enterprise work-force-management systems for staffing and scheduling. In fact, when it comes to staffing and scheduling, there is a chasm between finance and nursing.
Why is there such a deep divide when finance and nursing try to get together on a Workforce Management Solution? Are there features and functions for staffing and scheduling, which if understood by both, might bridge the divide?
- Finance is primarily concerned about the data that results from the application of work-force-management systems.
- Finance wants accurate labor cost data from the system – and, of course, the best possible price for the system.
- Nurse managers and nurses use these systems day by day, shift by shift.
- Nurses and nurse managers demand usability, solid functionality and clinically meaningful features that support quality care.
How can finance and nursing get together on a solution for staffing and scheduling? They should look for features and functions that safeguard the quality of patient care by optimizing appropriate and effective staffing, improve the quality of life for nurses, and protect the hospital’s bottom line.
Open-shift management:
Managers use Open-Shift Management to post unfilled shifts. Open-shift management gives nurses the opportunity to pick up additional shifts and increase their income. Filling open shifts with full-time, part-time or float pool staff reduces overtime. It also decreases the need for the staffing office to call in nurses from a staffing agency, every hospital’s most costly nursing option.
Self-scheduling:
This enables nurses to access units’ overall schedules from the Internet so that they can request shifts and swap shifts with their colleagues. This helps them better balance the demands of work and home life, and improves job satisfaction and decreases turnover. Self-scheduling also encourages nurses to share responsibility with unit managers and their colleagues for ensuring that all shifts are covered and adequately staffed. Hospitals that use self-scheduling find they can reduce overtime and the need to bring in agency nurses.
Needs-based staffing:
Over-staffing is inefficient and costly for hospital units. Under-staffing can create patient safety, quality-of-care and morale problems. Needs-based staffing accounts for patient acuity and ensures every unit has the appropriate number of nurses – with the skill sets needed – to provide good care given the complexity of patients’ conditions and the intensity of services patients are likely to require during the next shift.
Patient assignment balancing:
When two nurses on the same shift each have three patients, all too often one nurse seemingly is assigned the unit’s three patients with the most-intense care needs, while the other cares for three less-demanding patients. Staffing and scheduling functionality that balances assignments based on documented patient acuity solve the problem. This allows nurse managers to focus on managing their units rather than having to help overburdened nurses.Read complete article from Health Management Technology »
Michael Meisel is vice president of product management and marketing for Concerro, San Diego.