Nurses as Full Partners in Health Delivery Model

It has been seen that "Improved Teamwork" has resulted from Nurse Engagement Strategies in the healthcare industry. Studies have shown that when nurses have been made full partners in service delivery model with physicians and more medical professionals, there has been improvement in the healthcare design. Nurses comprise more than 50% workforce of hospitals and as such have a vital role to play in the health outcome of patients.

It is essential that the management of the hospitals takes a conscious decision to institute an engagement strategy for nurses. With global movement of workforces, hospitals are increasingly turning to travel nurses and hiring nurses through contract and this mandates that a proactive plan should be set in motion to engage these employees with the parent company.

Let us here look at some of the travel nurse engagement strategies:

The challenge with travel nurses is that largely their assignments are of short or limited durations. But considering this, it is not so tough to have engagement model with travel nurses. The essential idea should be to begin on the very first day of their assignment. There should be scheduled performance feedback with mentorship or work-buddy programs. Also the hospital can invite them to employee social events for increased participation and organisational involvement.

There should a policy for the recognition of achievements and work excellence in alignment with an understanding of the employee’s career goals and interests. They should be assigned special projects and assignments geared toward their goals and interests. As an employer the hospital should inculcate a culture of collaboration by having provisions to include your contingent workforce in decision-making.

To provide more career advancement opportunities, the definition of clear and measurable employee goals and objectives during the on-boarding process should be provided to the nursing staff. Also, to avoid treating them like outsiders, they should be considered as a part of the team and given communication towards that goal. You can talk about this with a nursing agency in Sheffield when you are trying to find a good hospital to offer your services in.

Nurse staffing and the various recruitment and on boarding mediums will increase with an increase in the need of clinical set ups to optimise their staffing. There are various challenges which the workforce management would face include an increase in fee for garnering resources, improving brand visibility for potential employees, management of blended employee strength and compliance with regulations. Apart from bringing about changes in engagement policies, especially considering travel nurses, it is also essential that there is a change in the mindset of the healthcare leaders which can give a boost to the transformation of the health care systems.

It is essential that nurses are given equal opportunities and provided with application and evaluation parameters to help with an ongoing improvement in their career graph. Engagement of employees can also help in prevention of complications. Healthcare facility and its quality can be easily determined by a common indicator of complication index. Complications can present themselves in the form of diseases and infections, dissatisfactory patient outcomes and exorbitant costing of medical services.

A crucial role is played by the nursing staff and the nurse to patient ratio which determines the staffing levels. This level is computed by measuring the percentage of working nursing hours per year. Out of these working hours there is a certain percentage of contract working hours which are the hours when contracted nurses are filling the service delivery gap during the shortage of nurses. Thus when the existing staff is unable to provide full cover or the management is unable to fill in the vacancies – contract nurses are used.

Fusco Browne Healthcare connects employers and employees in healthcare Recruitment Agencies London. If you need good candidates or are looking for a job change in nursing, visit us at fuscobrownehealthcare.co.uk