Workforce Scheduling

Addressing the Critical Nurse Shortage & Its Impact on Patient Care and Safety

The worldwide shortage of registered nurses in healthcare organizations is expected to worsen over the next decade as nurses retire, demand for nurses rises as baby boomers age, and nursing schools are unable to produce enough graduates to meet the demand.

Factors contributing to the growing nurse shortage include a lack of qualified nursing instructors, decreased funding for training programs and difficult working conditions. The insufficient staffing that’s resulted from the nurse shortage is only exacerbating the situation because it raises nurses’ stress level and impacts their job satisfaction to the point that many are driven to leave the profession.

As the shortage of nurses becomes a growing problem in healthcare organizations, so does the impact the shortage has on patient care, satisfaction and safety. Numerous studies have been published in the health journals that point to a link between adequate or increased nurse staffing and lower hospital-related mortality rates, as well as reduced length of patient stays. In situations in which there was inadequate staffing, patient safety was found to be compromised. In addition, surveys of medical personnel and the public show that the majority of doctors and a large majority of the public cite the shortage of nurses as a leading cause of medical errors.

“The U.S. nursing shortage is projected to grow to 260,000 registered nurses by 2025. A shortage of this magnitude would be twice as large as any nursing shortage experienced in this country since the mid-1960s.”

Dr. Peter Buerhaus
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Nashville, Tennessee,
July/August 2009 Health Affairs

While there are already government, education and healthcare industry initiatives in place to address the nurse shortage and reverse the trend of nurses leaving the field and declining enrollment in nursing schools, it will be a number of years before we start to see a dramatic improvement in nursing staff levels across healthcare organizations. Therefore, there is the need for a solution that can be implemented quickly and will address the nurse shortage and help to alleviate its impact in a more timely way.

Making the Best Use of Scarce, but Critical Nursing Resources

“One of the activities that consumes the most time available to managers is scheduling and staffing … it was found that 11.1% of their time was spent on this activity.” Study conducted by the American Organization of Nurse Executives

By addressing the nurse shortage with a staffing solution, healthcare organizations can immediately begin to curtail this growing problem, but most importantly ensure they are meeting patient needs, maintaining high quality patient care and safety and ensuring satisfactory patient outcomes.

Implementing a solution that effectively schedules the optimal number and type of skilled, qualified employees can help a hospital transform the complex and time-consuming task of staff scheduling and resource allocation control into a well-managed process. By automating the scheduling process, hospitals can eliminate the manual copying of schedules into the calendaring system, saving management hours of time that can be better used to ensure quality patient care.

Contact us to find out how our workforce scheduling solutions can help your healthcare facility use qualified nursing resources wisely while improving staff and patient satisfaction.