HealthStream offers performance learning management solutions to help develop your healthcare staff into leaders and reduce turnover.
View All ProductsHealthStream works with healthcare organizations to create engaging and high-quality training videos for your staff and management.
View All ProductsImprove care quality and save money by making informed decisions about your healthcare facility and staff with HealthStream's reporting analytics solution.
View All ProductsHealthStream's proven methods for the improvement and overall engagement of your healthcare staff foster a positive workplace and increase retention rates.
View All ProductsBe confident in your staff’s ability to reduce risk by providing compliance training that changes behavior.
View All ProductsDevelop next-level people for next-level care by prioritizing quality and safety improvements.
View All ProductsEstablish a culture of belonging with education supporting DEI, wellness, engagement, and leadership development.
View All ProductsDeliver custom or industry designed product training directly to patient and resident care environments to reinforce proper use.
View All ProductsStop wasting money on RCM issues. Learn how to Provide your team with expert-led revenue cycle training to help them reduce denied claims, reimbursement mistakes, and more.
View All ProductsLearn about our advanced resuscitation training solutions. Our solutions are designed to help improve patient outcomes.
View All ProductsOur competency development solutions personalize learning for clinicians to bridge the gap between theory and practice for your nurse residents.
View All ProductsEnhance maternal & child nursing care with solutions focused on improving the quality of care for mothers, infants, and children.
View All ProductsAddress staffing orientation challenges to easily achieve and maintain certification with our emergency and acute care training solutions.
View All ProductsAs a premier provider of healthcare education, we are committed to promoting safer, more successful surgical and sedation outcomes for each and every patient.
View All ProductsOur solutions are designed to cater to the needs of patients, healthcare professionals, and organizations dealing with illnesses or chronic conditions.
View All ProductsHealthcare workforce management is essential. We provide advanced scheduling solutions for organizations to solve issues such as nurse retention
View All ProductsTackle all the challenges of provider directory management within a health plan with a single solution tailored to your specific needs.
View All ProductsOur affordable CVO credentialing services establish patient safety by enabling primary source verification for your healthcare organization.
View All ProductsFinally, a comprehensive resource to support collecting, storing, and sharing credentialing data with ease.
View All ProductsIntegrate with Epic to validate and add new providers directly to your provider master file.
View All ProductsMitigate risk and elevate your quality of care. Improving both clinical and business outcomes starts with a smarter, more integrated approach to regulatory training, continuing education and quality management.
Learn MoreScheduling software not only makes healthcare staff scheduling for nurse leadership more manageable and efficient, it can also assist human resource (HR) leaders with overcoming the growing workforce challenges they face. HR leaders are operating in an increasingly complex healthcare environment that continues to grapple with the effects of the pandemic. In addition to recruiting and retaining qualified employees during an unprecedented healthcare staff shortage, HR leaders are dealing with high staff turnover, clinician burnout, and low staff engagement.
One way to address these issues is by adopting a scheduling strategy that will provide the staff with greater job satisfaction and a healthier work-life balance. When employees are happy, they are more engaged and less likely to leave their employer.
Turnover among healthcare workers has increased in recent years. A report by the Advisory Board showed that median turnover for bedside RNs has doubled over the past decade, jumping from 8.7% in 2010 to 18.8% in 2021.
Meanwhile, in 2022, hospital turnover continues to be elevated, according to the 2023 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report. Nationally, the rate of hospital turnover is 22.7%, a 3.2% decrease from 2021. Nurse turnover is at 22.5%, which is a 4.6% decrease from 2021. The report said the nurse vacancy rate “remains critical” and is 15.7% nationally. Although it represents a 1.3% reduction than last year, more than 75% of hospitals have a vacancy rate that exceeds 10%. The findings also indicated that the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is $52,350, and that can result in a loss of between $6.6 million and $10.5 million per year for the average hospital.
“Today, hospitals are faced with even greater struggles as they address daily challenges of finding available capacity for a burgeoning patient population with an increased demand for inpatient healthcare services, combined with an uptick in employee turnover,” wrote Stephen Lothrop, a managing director for Berkeley Research Group, LLC, in an article for the American College of Healthcare Executives. “If a hospital did not have a disciplined management system and an employee retention strategy before the pandemic, the new demands on our healthcare systems are likely exploiting these struggles.”
Two of the major contributors to healthcare staff turnover are burnout and a lack of employee engagement. Burnout lowers nurses' quality of life, performance level, and organizational commitment and increases their intention to leave the job. It also has a profound impact on staffing, including absenteeism, presenteeism, reduced productivity, turnover, and clinicians leaving the profession, according to a 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled, “Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being.”
Before the pandemic, more than one-third of nurses reported burnout while annual nurse turnover was approximately 17%. Since COVID-19, nurse burnout has been around 50% and nurse turnover rates have ranged between 20% and 30%. That is what Jane Muir, a University of Virginia Health emergency room nurse and School of Nursing doctoral student, discovered in her research that was published in the June 2022 issue of the Journal of Patient Safety.
Muir and her colleagues also found that nurses who worked at hospitals with burnout reduction programs stayed at their jobs about 20% longer than nurses who worked at hospitals without such initiatives. Furthermore, they revealed that hospitals with burnout reduction initiatives spent $11,592 per nurse per year employed on burnout-related costs, and that was about 30% less than hospitals without such programs, which spent, on average, $16,736 per nurse per year employed. A strong argument can be made for HR leaders to create a retention strategy that involves increasing engagement among their clinician staff.
“Improving nurse engagement has implications for nurse retention,” researchers concluded in a 2016 study published in the Journal of Nursing Administration. “Nurses working in hospitals with higher levels of engagement are less likely to report job dissatisfaction, burnout and intent to leave, which have implications for nurse turnover. Additionally, our findings confirm previous studies both inside and outside of nursing that has identified engagement as a key facet of job satisfaction.”
As HR leaders build their retention plans, they should consider adopting a scheduling system that is flexible, easily accessible, and healthcare-specific.
With ShiftWizard, HR executives can offer a mobile-ready tool that can allow nurses to self-schedule, choose varying shift lengths, easily request time off, and swap shifts with their coworkers when needed. Adopting this flexible system as part of a workforce management strategy can position a facility as an attractive place to work.
Self-scheduling is a particularly useful feature because it gives nurses control to create a schedule that is most suitable for their lifestyle. When self-scheduling is utilized to its full capacity, it ensures nurses achieve better work-life harmony and helps them to avoid working stressful shift patterns that can lead to burnout.
“We found that flexible scheduling makes clinicians more likely to indicate improvement in control over their workload, which can translate into reduced work-related stress,” said Amy Sullivan, PsyD, ABPP, Director of Caregiver Engagement and Wellbeing in Cleveland Clinic’s Neurological Institute and first author of a 2022 study that examined the impact of a flexible schedule.
A key ingredient among healthcare organizations with highly engaged staff is that they nurture in their nurses a sense of empowerment to contribute in decision-making for schedules. This shared governance is important in empowering nurses and subsequently improving retention. If leadership can remove the stress caused by an inflexible schedule, nurses can find a more optimal balance between their careers and overall well-being.
HealthStream’s learning management system and healthcare training solutions support medical training initiatives and allow for the best patient care.
View All Learning & PerformanceHealthStream offers performance learning management solutions to help develop your healthcare staff into leaders and reduce turnover.
View All ProductsHealthStream works with healthcare organizations to create engaging and high-quality training videos for your staff and management.
View All ProductsImprove care quality and save money by making informed decisions about your healthcare facility and staff with HealthStream's reporting analytics solution.
View All ProductsHealthStream's proven methods for the improvement and overall engagement of your healthcare staff foster a positive workplace and increase retention rates.
View All ProductsWhen you enact HealthStream's quality compliance solutions, you can do so with the confidence your healthcare organization will meet all standards of care.
View All Quality & ComplianceBe confident in your staff’s ability to reduce risk by providing compliance training that changes behavior.
View All ProductsDevelop next-level people for next-level care by prioritizing quality and safety improvements.
View All ProductsEstablish a culture of belonging with education supporting DEI, wellness, engagement, and leadership development.
View All ProductsUtilize patient access solutions and advanced reimbursement solutions to manage clinical denials and improve your organization’s reimbursement strategy.
View All ReimbursementExpand the decision-making skills and effectiveness of your healthcare workforce with HealthStream's clinical development programs and services.
View All Clinical DevelopmentLearn about our advanced resuscitation training solutions. Our solutions are designed to help improve patient outcomes.
View All ProductsOur competency development solutions personalize learning for clinicians to bridge the gap between theory and practice for your nurse residents.
View All ProductsEnhance maternal & child nursing care with solutions focused on improving the quality of care for mothers, infants, and children.
View All ProductsAddress staffing orientation challenges to easily achieve and maintain certification with our emergency and acute care training solutions.
View All ProductsAs a premier provider of healthcare education, we are committed to promoting safer, more successful surgical and sedation outcomes for each and every patient.
View All ProductsOur solutions are designed to cater to the needs of patients, healthcare professionals, and organizations dealing with illnesses or chronic conditions.
View All ProductsMake sure your healthcare staff can schedule out appointments and work schedules with ease using HealthStream's line of software solutions.
View All SchedulingHealthcare workforce management is essential. We provide advanced scheduling solutions for organizations to solve issues such as nurse retention
View All ProductsComprehensive, industry-leading provider onboarding and credentialing software that validate health outcomes and support provider assessment.
View All CredentialingOur affordable CVO credentialing services establish patient safety by enabling primary source verification for your healthcare organization.
View All ProductsIntegrate with Epic to validate and add new providers directly to your provider master file.
View All Products