The Critical Nurse Shortage

What are the Consequences of this Issue?

Canada is expected to reach a critical nurse shortage level by 2016. Although nurses’ vital services are in demand and nursing is an exciting career option, Canada is in a serious situation provincially, nationally and internationally with respect to employment of nurses. As the need for nurses increases with the growing population, the pool of available nurses continues to decline. Funding cuts have resulted in unbearable working conditions and unhealthy work environments, and poor staffing patterns have created heavy workloads. Combined with the lack of professional development opportunities, these circumstances have lead to an emotionally and physically depleted nursing workforce. Of greatest concern is the widespread forced move to part-time and casual work, which has led to fragmented patient care as well as the disillusionment of nurses with their profession.

By 2011, Canada will need 331,000 nurses to maintain healthcare optimally, but a nationwide shortage of 78,000 is expected by the Canadian Nurses Association within the next 3 years. The increase in enrollment in nursing schools is still not enough to fill the shortage. The high reduction rate in nursing personnel is partially due to retiring nurses and also because recruitment of nurses is occurring at a slower pace than retirement.

The province of Ontario has a nurse-to-patient ratio of 1 to 144 patients, and a nurse registration of 85,000 for a population of 12.3 million. While the RN ranks have shrunk and employment of new nurses has remained stagnant, Ontario’s population continues to grow. The Ontario public currently needs about 14,000 more RNs, as the province has the worst RN-to-population ratio in the country (65 RNs per 100,000, compared to 78.6 for the rest of Canada). Ontario is losing RNs faster for many reasons: one, nurses are leaving Ontario to work elsewhere (6,336 of those who retain Ontario registration alone; we do not know how many others left without retaining registration here); two, they are leaving for other kinds of work, and three, they are retiring, often well before age 65.

The nurse employment situation in Ontario has been deteriorating for many years and much faster than it has for the rest of the country, signaling an oncoming nursing shortage that will be severe for Ontario.

A Solution Addressing the Nurse Shortage

With an understanding of these unique nurse employment issues which currently healthcare providers across Canada are facing, Interbit Data, in partnership with Allocate Software, helps with aligning their staffing plans to meet the clinical needs of their patients. We currently deliver staffing solutions to over 200 hospital systems worldwide, including internationally-recognized healthcare providers such as Cambridge University Hospital and Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in the UK, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) International, Boston University Radiology Associates, Adventist Hospital and Sunway Medical Center in Asia.

The Challenge

The primary challenge for everyone working in healthcare is to ensure that patients receive the best possible care. Therefore, making sure the number of staff is in place to meet patient demand is not as simple as merely assigning a staff member to a vacant shift; it’s a complex task involving many elements and all areas of the organization.

Staffing challenges include:

• Ensuring the rights skills are on the unit at the right time – directly impacting the quality of care provided.
• Making better use of staff – utilizing staff hours more effectively.
• Managing staffing costs – by utilizing existing staff better, costs can be reduced and kept within budget.

Margaret Berry, former Chief Nurse at Cambridge University Hospitals National Health Service in the UK provides further explanation:

“Allocate Software recognized that meeting scheduling challenges would not be straightforward. Any solution would need to work for the entire workforce process from understanding demand and budgets, managing staffing and absence, to clinical scheduling and better managing temporary staff, all feeding through into payroll. It would also need to work across all departments; from nursing, doctors, operations to finance, payroll and human resources. Above all, the solution would need to be simple, intuitive and provide real benefits to staff on the unit.”

The MAPS Health Suite offered by Allocate Software through Interbit Data has been developed as a unique approach to clinical scheduling and open shift management. More than that, it’s designed to improve the effectiveness of nursing and other clinical staff to better meet patient demand.

Not content with just turning a paper process into an electronic one, Allocate Software streamlined the entire staffing process – from modeling the demand, through to scheduling and payroll – to make it more efficient for everyone involved. The solution provides:

• Supply and Demand Modeling – understanding the staff required to meet the needs of the service and ensuring this is aligned with the organization’s budgets and staffing.
• Scheduling – efficiently deploying the staff on shifts to meet the patient needs.
• Temporary Staff and Agency Management – managing temporary relief staff and agency requests, the process is completely integrated to scheduling, resulting in streamlined processes.
• Payroll Integration – calculating the pay for staff and feeding the payroll to dramatically reduce admin overhead and deliver more accurate payroll.
• Analysis – measuring the performance and issues of units against common standards, across all levels of the organization.

Today’s nurses are overworked and hospitals are understaffed due to the economic issues facing all of us today. With the shortages becoming more prevalent, it is even more important to keep qualified nurses happy and to have them working with patients when needed and not over burdened with paperwork. One solution is to make sure hospitals have an automated staff scheduling system which ensures that hospital staff is properly utilized using the three R’s: “Right people at the Right Place at the Right time”.

Download the MAPS Health Suite datasheet for more information.