staffing

“Your discharge is not priority”..

January 7, 2023 by NurseTwain

“Due to short staffing, we are closing early. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

“Please expect longer than usual wait times due to short staffing..”

“Now hiring. $15/hr starting pay.”

These signs and statements look all too familiar within today’s society. The nursing shortage has been ongoing for years and only getting worse. Short staffing at grocery stores or restaurants cause frustration and inconvenience. However, short staffing in healthcare is deadly and only increases the shortage as healthcare workers are overworked and burnt out.

It is really hard to be the nurse that we signed up to be…

When we can’t talk to our patients like we would like to and truly listen to them without having 1000 other urgent tasks to complete
When we don’t have time to brush our patient’s hair or give them a shower
When we don’t catch a dangerous trend in labs or vital signs because we are too busy to think
When we make a simple medication error because our phone keeps ringing or call lights are nonstop
When we don’t have the compassion we did as a new nurse..

As a nurse, we pledge an oath to do no harm, but it is very difficult when we do not have the resources we need to be successful and advocate for our patients as we should.

What doesn’t make sense either, is that administration views short staffing as doable, giving more and more patients to staff because they have to. But, are these overworked staff receiving additional pay? Most of us are not. The healthcare system does not operate on the usual economical supply and demand system. As demand rises, our pay does not increase.

From a patient standpoint, outcomes and satisfaction suffers. Healthcare worker violence rises and staffing is a major factor. Nurses must prioritize care, especially when having high-acuity loads and no help.

We must treat a low blood pressure before performing wound care.
We have to prevent a patient from falling before administering your home medication on your own schedule.
We will attend to a code before patient teaching.
We have to administer scheduled medications and/or pain medications, before printing discharge instructions.

Your discharge is not priority. We are literally saving lives and patients need to realize that a hospital is not a hotel.

I guarantee you, nurses are not just sitting at the station playing cards, drinking tea, or any other outrageous assumption made by the media. We are trying…

Until next shift,

Shania

Retention, Recruitment, Resilience.. Oh, My!

July 2, 2022 by NurseTwain

These three words are dominating the media when it comes to nursing. Facilities attempt to retain their current staff while also trying to combat the ever-increasing staffing shortage by recruiting new hires. Staff are also reminded and educated on ways to be resilient and how to prevent burnout.

Unfortunately in America, even nonprofit hospitals have to be run like a business. Our bedside nurses are the number one asset to a successful hospital as they care for the income drivers.. the patients. Bedside nursing is a physically and emotionally demanding job that wears on even the best of nurses. I left the bedside for these reasons and also to follow my career path of leadership and education. By accepting my position into Nursing Professional Development, I see the leadership perspective of how to run a hospital.

Yes, staffing is a problem. Yes, nurses are not getting paid enough. Yes, there are more and more demands placed on nursing without incentives or relief. But, one of the main issues regarding increasing nursing staff is actually getting additional nurses into the door. The time to hire is a challenge for many organizations. This can be related to slow HR processes (they are short-staffed, too) and/or the amount of time it takes to train a nurse for the assigned unit. Even an experienced nurse can take several weeks to get acclimated to a facilities’ policies and procedures. Certain positions, such as the OR and Critical Care, are noted to be some of most challenging positions to fill due to the scope and specialty.

According to the 2022 NSI report, “on average, it takes 87 days (3 months) to recruit an experienced RN.” During this period, more staff may be leaving, additional positions, and the cycle continues. As the need increases, the vacancy rates continue to increase, and bedside nurses leave due to thin staffing, hospitals cannot keep up with the demand.

I write this mainly to draw attention to our strained and flawed healthcare system. Pay incentives and large recruitment bonuses are only temporary solutions. Long-term solutions can only be successful if we can recruit, retain, and promote resilience within our organizations. Be sure to listen to the staff, be transparent, suit their needs, and acknowledge the work that each individual contributes.

Until next shift,

Shania

Click to access NSI_National_Health_Care_Retention_Report.pdf

The Great Resignation: Nurse PTSD

January 6, 2022 by NurseTwain

They say cardiovascular disease is the “silent killer”, but did you know that many nurses post Covid are suffering from the silent killer of PTSD?

During the peak of Covid, frontline staff were plunged into a plethora of uncertainty. No one knew what Covid was, how it effected the body, what the disease process was, what type of isolation was appropriate, etc. Then came concerns over PPE supply, vaccination status, and most recently, questionable CDC guidance. Nurses lived in a constant fight or flight response as they obsessively watched O2 monitors and prayed for an uneventful shift. The Delta variant proved to be brutal and rampant as more patients were intubated at bedside and transferred to the ICU than many of us saw in our whole nursing careers combined. These patients were so sick and everyone was so critical that nursing had to prioritize patients who were originally healthy and able-bodied, full codes, in order to preserve respiratory equipment as much as possible.

Crisis protocols were in place and meant that we reused single-use PPE and placed a 6L nasal cannula plus a nonrebreather on a patient because we didn’t have enough high flow cannulas. Allow these things to continue for nearly 2 years and now dealing with the third Covid variant, means that nurses are tired and burnt out.

Many nurses are leaving to travel and make more money for the same job duties, some are leaving the bedside and stepping into less stressful job positions, and others are retiring or even just leaving the profession for good.

The struggle we face as a facility and as a nation is critical staffing shortages. Patients will never stop flooding the ER, but what happens when we have no healthcare professionals to properly care for all of these people? More money and incentives are only temporary. A long-term solution involves staff retention and recruitment coupled with staff engagement and empowerment.

Until next shift,

Shania

“Your discharge is not priority”..

Retention, Recruitment, Resilience.. Oh, My!

The Great Resignation: Nurse PTSD

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