Nurturing the Heart of Healthcare
Nurse retention is an important aspect of the healthcare industry globally. Nurse retention refers to inhibiting nurse turnover rates. The purpose of this paper is to provide research on the ways to improve nurse retention in the workforce, benefits, and challenges associated. Nurse retention is critical to enhance financial stability and improve patient outcomes.
Background to Nurse Retention in the Workforce
High turnover rates negatively impact the quality of patient care and other nursing staff. The high costs of replacing a single nurse range between $62,100 and $67,100 (Lyu et al., 2016). Such high costs of replacement have presented a shortage of nurses and hence the need to improve nurse retention. Studies have indicated that hospitals lose an average of $8 million per year due to nurse turnover. Literally, when experienced nurses resign from their profession, healthcare facilities are prompted to recruit new employees to replace them (Lyu et al., 2016). This has great impacts on the patient outcomes because newly graduated nurses who are mostly recruited, as a result, lack prior experience and end up providing substandard health services.
Additionally, the nursing staff is also affected emotionally as they lose a colleague they have been used to and having to accommodate new employees periodically. Accordingly, young nurse graduates may be prompted to change their careers in lieu of the turnover rates associated with their profession. This is because such phenomena are an indication of a critical problem with the nursing profession and these graduates may fear for their future and hence, opt for other careers.
Ways of Improving the Retention in the Workforce
Nurse retention can be improved through adopting various strategies as follows building workplace capacity. Nursing managers need to initiate an innovative culture to promote creativity, the advancement of skills and knowledge (Health Workforce Australia, 2014). This calls for providing the necessary education, training, and enhancement of management and leadership roles. Additionally, early career preparation and workplace support are vital. Nurses need to have prior preparation before venturing into the workforce. In this regard, nursing graduates should have a skill set that prepares them to face the demands of the nursing profession by providing them with the appropriate academic foundation and practical skills.
The workplace support entails clearly outlining the job responsibilities, recognizing nurses’ support, while matching with remuneration and the available resources (Halter et al., 2017). This ensures that newly employed nurses face the workforce with the zeal to achieve organizational goals. As such, the nurses maintain the desire to work in such an environment. Further, the motivation of nurses can be catalyzed by rewarding individual efforts regularly (Health Workforce Australia, 2014). Nurses need different kinds of incentives such as regularly paid leaves, holiday tours, and bonuses for overtime to keep them motivated to work in the same organization.
Benefits of Improving Retention in the Workforce
Nurse retention has various benefits for healthcare organizations. Some of the strategic benefits of nurse retention include a reduction in acquisition and training time. Notably, turnover incidences initiate a need to recruit new employee which consumes time in conducting interviews and negotiations (Halter et al., 2017). Majoring on nurse retention, therefore, paves the way to cut down such expenses and time-consuming and hence maintain a smooth workflow.
Additionally, retention increases productivity. The nurses employed to replace vacant positions may take approximately 2 years before attaining the productivity level maintained by the former employee (Halter et al., 2017). In this regard, productivity deteriorates and patient outcomes are negatively affected. As such, potential clients may flee a particular organization owing to such productivity issues. It is, therefore, important to retain nurses to maintain high productivity levels.
Nurse retention spread love to the clients. Focusing on strategies to maintain the nurse workforce makes them happy and determined in their work. Such happiness is passed to the current and potential clients as nurses serve them whole-heartedly and with suggestions to welcome them back (Halter et al., 201. Happy nurses will provide better services to the patients and work earnestly towards establishing a good organizational reputation.
Challenges of Improving Nurse Retention in the Workforce
Despite all the benefits associated with nurse retention, there are challenges that face this issue. Retaining employees is faced with various challenges including the availability of better opportunities in other organizations. Although an organization may desire to retain their employees, competitive opportunities arising from stronger healthcare facilities pose challenges to them (Health Workforce Australia, 2014). Of course, any employee will give priority to a better paying-organization with better working conditions, at the expense of the current workplace. In other words, better opportunities present challenges in retaining employees to some healthcare organizations.
Unsuitable shifts and working hours also pose challenges in nurse retention. The increasing zeal to gain more academic skills requires nurses to have flexible work shifts to fit their study time schedules (Health Workforce Australia, 2014). If organizations fail to offer suitable shifts to such nurses, they may opt to resign and concentrate on their furthering education. Further, nurses with small babies also require shifts that favor their needs to nurse their little ones. The lack of such opportunities may lead them to leave the job until their children are big. Therefore, unsuitable shifts to accelerate the nurse turnover rates.
Conclusion
In conclusion, nurse retention is a critical issue of consideration in healthcare organizations. Retention has various benefits including increased experience which enhances patient outcomes and client feedback. Various strategies can be implemented to improve retention such as remuneration increase and career development opportunities. However, nurse retention also faces some challenges such as the availability of better opportunities and unsuitable shifts.
References
Halter, M., Pelone, F., Boiko, O., Beighton, C., Harris, R., Gale, J., … & Drennan, V. (2017). Interventions to reduce adult nursing turnover: a systematic review of systematic reviews. The open nursing journal, 11, 108.
Health Workforce Australia. (2014). Nursing workforce sustainability, improving nurse retention and productivity.
Lyu, L., Li, G., Li, J., & Li, M. (2016). Nurse turnover research in China: a bibliometric analysisfrom 2000 to 2015. International Journal of Nursing Sciences, 3(2), 208-212.