With nursing shortages on the rise, there are no shortages of opportunities for good nurses. The best way to combat the turnover that might cause? Make sure your nurses are happy in their environment and their positions.

A Life Concierge

For most employees, a work-life balance is an important facet when choosing an organization. At Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. nurses can choose from flexible scheduling and part-time, 8-hour or 12-hour shifts to accommodate different family and lifestyle needs.

At Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center, employees have free concierge services on hand to help with daily errands and essentials. Nurses can call in for help with dinner reservations, car repairs, mailings, event planning, dry cleaning, and lawn and garden care.

“If you want to attend a dinner and play in San Francisco after work, the concierge service can make your reservations,” says Kathy Sommese, a clinical nurse supervisor for Permanente.

There are also numerous health-club membership and local attraction discounts, and tuition benefits.

Education

Most employees want to continue to grow in their career. This is why many medical facilities are now offering on-site degree programs, particularly when the facility is in a partnership with a surrounding university.

Many organizations promote further education by offering onsite master’s- and bachelor’s-degree programs for nurses, tuition reimbursement, scholarships and flexible scheduling to support nurses who want to continue their education.

Beyond a Signing Bonus

A signing bonus usually guarantees a two-year run for a nurse at a facility. But what about when those two years are up? Some places are forgoing signing bonuses for professional development programs, proving nurses with a career path that promises growth.

At Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital in Yakima, Wash., nurses are nurtured with a supportive corporate culture and numerous opportunities for upward mobility. “Into the Blue,” a four-day program, to all employees focuses on maximizing the spirit of leadership in every individual.

“The program essentially teaches employees how to better understand one another’s personalities and temperaments and how to foster healthy relationships,” says Jennifer Tate, Yakima’s director of organizational health and wellness. “It shows how to remove self-imposed limits to achieve your goals.”

More than 1,800 employees have gone through the program and have reported tremendous success.

“I’ve heard story after story of how this program has changed our employees’ lives both personally and professionally,” Tate says. “There was one woman who always wanted to learn how to scuba dive and this course motivated her to do so at the age of 60.”

Whether it’s opportunities for free tuition, leadership development or dry cleaning pickup, organizations need to remember that nurses spend a lot of hours in the workplace. The best way to retain these employees is to make them feel appreciated and empowered.

Want

Forget good to great. Here’s what makes a great employee remarkable.

Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders and great followers… they possess a wide range of easily-defined—but hard to find—qualities.

A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance.

Here are eight qualities of remarkable employees:

1. They ignore job descriptions. The smaller the company, the more important it is that employees can think on their feet, adapt quickly to shifting priorities, and do whatever it takes, regardless of role or position, to get things done.
When a key customer’s project is in jeopardy, remarkable employees know without being told there’s a problem and jump in without being asked—even if it’s not their job.

2. They’re eccentric… The best employees are often a little different: quirky, sometimes irreverent, even delighted to be unusual. They seem slightly odd, but in a really good way. Unusual personalities shake things up, make work more fun, and transform a plain-vanilla group into a team with flair and flavor.

People who aren’t afraid to be different naturally stretch boundaries and challenge the status quo, and they often come up with the best ideas.

3. But they know when to dial it back. An unusual personality is a lot of fun… until it isn’t. When a major challenge pops up or a situation gets stressful, the best employees stop expressing their individuality and fit seamlessly into the team.

Remarkable employees know when to play and when to be serious; when to be irreverent and when to conform; and when to challenge and when to back off. It’s a tough balance to strike, but a rare few can walk that fine line with ease.

4. They publicly praise… Praise from a boss feels good. Praise from a peer feels awesome, especially when you look up to that person.

Remarkable employees recognize the contributions of others, especially in group settings where the impact of their words is even greater.

5. And they privately complain. We all want employees to bring issues forward, but some problems are better handled in private. Great employees often get more latitude to bring up controversial subjects in a group setting because their performance allows greater freedom.
Remarkable employees come to you before or after a meeting to discuss a sensitive issue, knowing that bringing it up in a group setting could set off a firestorm.

6. They speak when others won’t. Some employees are hesitant to speak up in meetings. Some are even hesitant to speak up privately.

An employee once asked me a question about potential layoffs. After the meeting I said to him, “Why did you ask about that? You already know what’s going on.” He said, “I do, but a lot of other people don’t, and they’re afraid to ask. I thought it would help if they heard the answer from you.”
Remarkable employees have an innate feel for the issues and concerns of those around them, and step up to ask questions or raise important issues when others hesitate.

7. They like to prove others wrong. Self-motivation often springs from a desire to show that doubters are wrong. The kid without a college degree or the woman who was told she didn’t have leadership potential often possess a burning desire to prove other people wrong.
Education, intelligence, talent, and skill are important, but drive is critical. Remarkable employees are driven by something deeper and more personal than just the desire to do a good job.

8. They’re always fiddling. Some people are rarely satisfied (I mean that in a good way) and are constantly tinkering with something: Reworking a timeline, adjusting a process, tweaking a workflow.
Great employees follow processes. Remarkable employees find ways to make those processes even better, not only because they are expected to… but because they just can’t help it.

This article was written by Jeff Haden and appeared on the inc website.

http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-8-qualities-of-remarkable-employees.html?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=button

Even with legions of clinicians and healthcare executives working to improve patient safety, medical errors still cost tens of thousands of lives each year. What more can hospitals do to reduce the number of medication errors, hospital infections and even wrong-site surgeries?

Many institutions are making progress in guarding against medical errors by recruiting medical staff that will make safety their top priority.

Creating a Culture of Patient Safety

Culture is one of the most promising frontiers of patient safety. A safety-oriented culture begins with establishing checks and balances on traditional top-down authority in the medical profession. Behavior-management techniques including training, goal-setting and feedback have been shown to increase clinicians’ use of basic safety procedures such as hand sanitization, often doubling the proportion of workers in compliance, according to one literature review.

Ongoing peer-to-peer training can help ensure that a safety culture permeates a hospital’s workforce. Clinicians can use a simple interpersonal coaching process, similar to how astronauts train—they watch and coach each other.

Employee Engagement Boosts Patient Safety

A successful patient-safety program must encompass both systems and people to avoid more potential medical errors. For example, think of medication dispensation systems where nurses match bar codes on individual doses with patient identification bracelets. If the system doesn’t fit into the workflow of nurses, they may use workarounds, which are likely to increase the chance of errors. Hospitals must work hard to ensure that patient-safety initiatives are relevant to the conditions that bedside clinicians face daily

Hiring to Reduce Medical Errors and Improve Medical Care

Many hospitals have invested in staff whose sole job is to improve patient safety. Retraining can also help many hospital workers join a safety-oriented culture, and so can screening job candidates for their willingness to adapt their work behavior to reduce patient risk.

One last point to ponder: reducing medical errors makes sense financially.

With increased pressure on hospitals to cut costs such as avoidable readmissions of patients, there are now powerful financial incentives for investments in safety ranging from patient-monitoring technologies to training peer clinicians to critique each others’ safety performance. Insurers and the government are demanding transparency on quality metrics, so if you don’t improve care quality, you’re not going to get paid. There’s also an increasing recognition that, in the long run, investments in patient safety pay for themselves.

If you’d like to know more about how to hire the right people to create a safety-conscious culture at your healthcare organization, contact Morgan Hunter HealthSearch today!

About Morgan Hunter HealthSearch
Morgan Hunter HealthSearch (MHHS) provides Executive Search and Interim Leadership solutions for hospitals and health systems throughout the United States.  Our services include executive healthcare recruiting, retained healthcare executive search, healthcare interim management, executive placement for hospitals. 

Morgan Hunter HealthSearch recently had the unique opportunity to work with The Ashland Health Center, a tiny hospital in southwest Kansas.  This hospital takes a unique approach to recruiting top-tier healthcare professionals to a rural location.  Listen to the interview from NPR below that outlines this unique approach to recruiting:

Hospital executives constantly face the challenge of managing labor costs and fluctuating levels of available clinical personnel while managing patient care.

KPMG LLP’s Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals division recently conducted a study that addressed hospitals’ views on quality of patient care, direct employee labor costs, and temporary nurse usage. The 2011 U.S. Hospital Nursing Labor Costs Study, based on a survey of 120 senior hospital executives throughout the United States, provided some interesting facts on the costs of nursing staffing.

Essentially, the study indicates that the cost of employing a permanent nurse is essentially the same as the cost of using a traveling or per diem nurse.

Labor Cost for a Full-Time Registered Nurse
According to the survey, the total cost of a full-time direct care hospital RN averages $98,000 per year, or $45 an hour, of which only $55,739 is base wages ($25.84/hour).

Fully-loaded payroll, which includes base wages, employer taxes and paid time off represents 76-78% of the total cost of the RN labor force. The balance is made up of non-productivity costs (12-13%), insurance costs (8-9%), recruiting costs (1-2%), and other costs (1%). In other words, the actual cost per hour for a full time nurse is on average 176% of their base hourly wage.

Hidden Costs of Full-Time Nursing Labor
The KPMG study also revealed significant additional nursing labor costs, such as non-productive labor hours and associated opportunity costs, attrition, and time required to fill a permanent direct care RN position. Non-productive labor hours on average represent 13% of total hours.

Optimum Staffing Levels and Quality Override Cost as Decision Factors
Two-thirds of the hospital executives who responded to the survey say they are currently using travel or per diem nurses. Why? They say their main reasons are supply and demand, and the quality of these nurses, which appear to be even more important factors than cost.

Some reasons that enable some hospitals not to use traveling staff include the use of extra full-time staff, part-time employed staff, and incentives to limit turnover and to encourage working overtime. Many of these factors may be of a temporary nature, and increase costs and turnover over the long term.

Respondents also stated that they felt the ideal balance is 90% permanent staff and 10% supplemental labor.

The KPMG study shows that temporary and permanent staff cost the same, so hospitals can determine their optimal ratio of temporary to full-time staff with cost being a neutral factor. Travel nurses present essentially the same cost to a hospital as a full-time staff member, and furthermore, studies have also shown that travel nurses offer the same level of quality care as permanent nurses employed by hospitals.

When patients visit emergency rooms or outpatient clinics in need of medical attention, effective patient flow facilitates the timely care of patients and avoids a bottleneck that can disrupt more than one department of the hospital.

Patient flow encompasses the systematic process of attending to patients, from the time they walk into a medical facility to the time they check out for discharge. It depends on both medical and administrative functions.

To improve patient flow in your facility, you need to evaluate the length of time it takes for a patient to check into a facility, have her paperwork processed, have her vitals taken, see the doctor and, if necessary, be assigned an inpatient bed.

To evaluate patient flow in your facility will require some work. You will need to collate some research, such as why people visit the ER, the availability of alternative sites of care, patient insurance status, physician referral practices, and other variables.

Next, analyze the actual day-to-day operations of the ER over a set period of time.

How are ER processes designed? Are medical specialists and ancillary services available in a timely fashion? Is clinical information readily accessible?

Finally, take a look at how long it takes to move an ER patient to his or her next disposition. Does the hospital have the systems and capacity to move ER patients to critical care and other inpatient units if necessary?

To gather key measurements, look at the length of each segment of the ER visit:

• arrival to triage
• triage to ER
• ER to M.D care
• M.D. to disposition
• disposition to discharge

Pick a timeframe, perhaps two weeks, and collect statistics for

• total volume of patients
• average length of stay
• total holding time
• staff hour per patient
• number of patients seen and patients per hour
• bed placement statistics (e.g., how long from bed request to assignment)
• radiology and laboratory statistics (e.g., orders, completions and results postings).

You may be surprised to discover which factors are dramatically impacting patients’ length of stay.

Studying patient flow helps hospitals and other healthcare facilities provide better service to patients. By understanding flow trends, administrators can streamline processes to minimize wait times and improve the patient’s experience at the facility.

What would you do if you discovered an employee in your organization was violating your patients’ privacy rights?

It’s happening more frequently, as the portability and availability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have made it easier for medical professionals and staff to violate HIPAA laws. Despite legally mandated protections of patient information, there has been a sharp increase – and resulting uproar – in the improper viewing and misuse of patients’ protected health information.

• Earlier this year, the University Medical Center in Tucson, AZ fired three support staff members who inappropriately accessed confidential EHRs.

• In late 2010, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN terminated two medical professionals, including a physician, who did the same.

• In 2009, a federal judge in Little Rock, AR sentenced a doctor and two former hospital employees to a year’s probation after they admitted to accessing the records of a well-known patient.

• The UCLA Medical Center has had to take action against more than 100 employees who improperly accessed the medical records of celebrity patients.  One of those people was indicted and sentenced to four months in prison.

Unauthorized access to patient records by those not directly involved in treatment is a violation of the HIPAA privacy rule. The HITECH Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, increases the penalties for violations. The HITECH Act strengthens the civil and criminal enforcement of HIPAA privacy rules aimed at restricting and regulating the use and disclosure of Patient Health Information and increases the scope of legal liability being enforced upon those who are non-compliant.

In other words, health information security and privacy experts agree that healthcare employers and facilities need to protect themselves and take a strict approach by:

• Ensuring their policies, procedures and training regarding patient privacy are up to date and include discussion of EHRs

• Blocking access to EHRs for employees who do not need to see them

• Setting up oversight of EHR access with both technical and manual auditing

• Enforcing strict penalties for those who are caught snooping, including termination

As former U.S. Attorney Jane Duke of Arkansas said at the time of the Little Rock sentencings, “HIPAA protections apply to every person in the community, regardless of their position or stature. Likewise, the penalties for violating HIPAA apply equally to every person with access to protected health information.”

If you have any questions or would like to discuss how other healthcare facilities are dealing with issues related to PHI privacy, please contact Morgan Hunter HealthSearch today.

As the economy begins to pick back up, your top performers may end up getting offers from other companies. In past downturns and recoveries, many talented people jumped ship, especially when they perceived there was more opportunity elsewhere.

So what can you do to retain your best people?
The key is to identify your top performers, stay close to them, and work on finding rewards that work for them. Here are few tips:

Pay attention. Show your employees that you value them and their contributions. Tailor HR and benefit programs to meet the needs of your unique workforce. This may mean moving to flex time, PTO, or offering more choices in healthcare plans and adding any other unconventional policies.

Teach, coach…lead the flock. Provide ongoing training. Have an open door policy. Provide mentoring and opportunities that your competitors do not offer. Lead by example and follow through on your promises.

Ensure your company’s goals are in line with your employee reward system. Set clear expectations on how you will reward top performers.

Ask and you shall receive. Ask your top people why they like working at your company. Ask them why they stay. And ask them what they’d do differently. Use their feedback to make improvements. On the other hand, when someone leaves your company, ask them what made them make this decision. Knowing is half the battle.