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.

In 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 healthcare providers across Canada are currently facing, Interbit Data helps by providing optimized staff scheduling and employee retention resources.

The Challenge

The primary challenge for everyone working in healthcare is ensuring that patients receive the best possible care. Therefore, staff scheduling is not as simple as merely assigning a staff member to a vacant shift; it’s a complex task that has become a major issue for healthcare providers for several reasons:

• Not having the appropriate number of nurses on hand can lead to increased costs as well as a decrease in the quality of patient care.
• An inability to effectively manage nursing staff resources and their scheduling needs can lead to excess overtime costs.
• The significant amount of time that nurse managers spend on scheduling – in some cases up to 36 hours per month – is time that could be spent on providing higher quality patient care.
• The high turnover among nursing professionals, which is partly attributed to nurses’ frustration with achieving schedules that meet their requests and needs.

With Schedulist, Interbit Data offers a unique approach to clinical scheduling and open shift management. The web-based software efficiently optimizes staffs scheduling and delivers it in a way that enhances employee job satisfaction and loyalty as well as improves the effectiveness of nursing and other clinical staff to meet patient needs.
Schedulist offers many features that ease the scheduling process for both management and staff:

• Individual Profiles – Keep track of each person’s unique abilities so you know you have the right people in the right job.
• Personalized Schedules – Create schedules in the way that works best for you – either manual with assistance from the system, or completely automatic.
• Customizable Schedules – Select and arrange the widgets you want to use so you can run your schedule your way.
• Employee Feedback – Allow your employees to tell you when they want to work, but you set the rules to keep it fair.
• Real-Time Decision Support – Obtain instant feedback about the effect of your scheduling choices on your key metrics.
• Social Networking – Social tools to encourage the development of communities and communication tools to enhance the connection between management and staff.
• Manage Assets – Link equipment to people so that you can be sure that you schedule the right people AND equipment.
• Shift Management – Manage people with multiple skills so you can fill the gaps in your shifts.
• Pattern Scheduling – Tools to plan for any scheduling scenario.
• Optimized Schedules – Receive alerts when there are too many or too few staff on the schedule.
• Reporting – Dynamically create reports from dozens of stored metrics.

Today’s nurses are overworked and hospitals are understaffed due to the economic issues they face. 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 have an automated staff scheduling system that ensures both the highest level of staffing efficiency and job satisfaction.