Open positions in nursing

From HMCwiki

With the number of open positions in nursing forecasted to increase in the coming years, hospital administrators need to figure out how to best address the challenge of filling nursing postitions during a time of labor shortages. According to a study published in the January 2006 issue of Health Affairs, U.S. hospitals could prevent approximately 6,700 patient deaths, 70,400 complications and 4 million patient days if more nurses were hired and nurse:patient ratios were consequently improved upon. But how do you increase the hours of patient care if the pool of qualified applicants has been drained shallow? One way is to maximize the productivity of your existing nursing staff.

Even without increases in productivity, hospitals will need to fill these open positions. Therefore, unchanged productivity, never mind negative productivity, will only exacerbate the pending labor crisis.

Maximize Nursing Productivity

In order to help nurse staff become more productive, a thorough evaluation of the systems and processes that the nurse units follow needs to occur. Using the same systems and processes that require more nurses, rather than changing the processes to support increased productivity, would probably increase the likelihood that failure would result from the organization's attempt to improve productivity.

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