Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/665914
14 | 5 Staffing Strategies for Engaged Nurses Better Patient Outcomes But in addition to the autonomy the upgrade granted nurses and the other staffing messes it untangled, the system's adoption of API Healthcare's ShiftSelect yielded other important results: Hillcrest attributes a savings of $2 million annually to streamlined staffing. "We attribute our savings to the fact that if we hadn't developed our resource team and had stayed on the same sort of trajectory we were on, we'd be spending more than we'd realize on overtime and agency costs," Ms. Bible says. Resolving staffing issues to improve a facility overall A smarter system's impact on staff morale can generate long-lasting change in a hospital or health system. Research shows that reducing the amount of overtime worked and minimizing lengthy back- to-back shifts lowers turnover as job satisfaction increases. The same goes for patient outcomes — the less overworked members of a care team are, the lower the likelihood of medical errors. Additionally, the more a staff member feels their opinion matters, the more invested they are in the culture of a facility. "In the older, more industrial model of running a hospital, staff members were sort of seen as widgets, pegs to fill a hole," Dr. Kerfoot says. "The more people feel that way the less they interact, they don't make suggestions, they don't improve practices." One way to fix the widget problem is by moving toward a shared governance structure, the development of which Dr. Kerfoot says is directly linked to improving staffing system-wide. A shared governance structure can take the form of a nursing committee or any staff-led organization that takes into account the concerns of frontline healthcare workers. After forming its resource team, Hillcrest reached out to representatives from all of the parties affected by staffing decisions at its facilities to hear their respective needs. The meeting of CNOs and unit managers enabled each group to share its feelings about the way staffing was handled and to ensure that the new system would account for everyone's interests. Ms. Bible says that this sort of relationship-building practice has noticeably lowered staff turnover and significantly boosted employee satisfaction response and support ratings to over 90 percent. Beyond the savings that add up from a reduced reliance on agency nurses, overtime and a high rate of shift coverage — 83 percent at Hillcrest— using electronic systems equipped to think can produce a variety of useful metrics for hospitals, such as predicting shortages in specific units and providing focused feedback that can be applied to hiring criteria "Smarter staffing systems are an opportunity to think beyond just the unit or beyond the hospital," Dr. Kerfoot says. "The way you become effective as a system is to connect your different facilities and units. Once you get the big picture of what's going on with staffing, then you can start to make changes that really do make a difference." "The system's adoption of API Healthcare's ShiftSelect yielded other important results: Hillcrest attributes a savings of $2 million annually to streamlined staffing."