The nursing shortage rages on, particularly with new nurses. An estimated 33% of new nurses leave the profession their first year, accounting for as much as 83% of a hospital’s total turnover. A new, centralized approach to hiring and onboarding may help.
While perhaps reaching a crescendo during the pandemic, the nursing shortage persists, impacting everything from patient care to morale. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a need for more than one million new nurses by 2028. High turnover rates in nursing, often exceeding 15%, and lack of a perpetual hiring model to minimize staff vacancies contributes to instability and higher costs while compromising patient care.
New nurses often find the transition from education to practice problematic, dealing with grueling hours and demanding workloads that they’re unaccustomed to. In fact, first-year nurses are particularly susceptible to turnover — novice nurses leaving the profession in their first-year account for as much as 83% of a hospital’s total turnover.
And with turnovers, nursing leaders often find themselves in a scramble state, forced to fill vacancies with existing staff, which can cause burnout, or expensive travel nurses. Without having the ability to predict who will make their exit, leaders may end up waiting until someone actually leaves to start the HR process to hire a replacement. Having a continual pipeline of new nurses could save significant time and money.
What’s the answer to mitigating turnover in today’s talent market?
It starts with being proactive. Tackling turnover and cultivating a pipeline of qualified new nurses who stay in their jobs means thinking about onboarding and retention a little differently, putting the focus on centrally managing these processes. Bringing all aspects of nurse recruitment, hiring, and retention into a single process can be the solution, in an always-on centralized model that streamlines onboarding, minimizes vacancies, and maximizes efficiencies.
A centralized model makes the shift from staffing at the hospital or unit level to staffing through a central, dedicated unit that supports onboarding and hiring on a rolling basis. A chief learning officer (CLO) may be at the helm, ensuring that a hiring and retention strategy is developed and adhered to. A centralized model can avoid many of the obstacles associated with unit-level staffing, such as the need for resources not being communicated, lack of alignment on pay issues, the chance for patient errors, and more. Not only is onboarding streamlined, but a centralized model directly addresses new nurse burnout and satisfaction as a way to deal with turnover.
But moving to a different approach takes some analysis and preparation. How does your organization get started? You need a well-thought-out strategy that can make the case to executive management to adopt what might otherwise appear to be an over-hiring strategy.
Start by assessing where you are
You may need to ask some tough questions, such as does it legitimately take longer to hire and orient new nurses, how heavily does the administrative novice-nurse onboarding process burden your nurse managers, and is turnover negatively influencing patient outcomes? It’s important to gauge how difficult your current onboarding process may be and whether improvements can move the needle in terms of retention. Next, you’ll want to look at numbers.
Understanding that the new nurse hiring process can take from 4-6 months and the cost for interim staffing can be astronomical, computing baseline numbers can help attach figures to turnover. Calculating your hospital’s cost per hire and attrition rate can determine a baseline.
Leverage baseline data to make your case
Once you have baseline numbers, carry out a predictive analysis based on the average attrition rate for the number of nurses leaving each month. This can help cement your argument for funding a centralized model. Moving to a centralized model can have a huge impact on the bottom line, as each 1% change in nurse turnover is estimated to cost — or save — the average hospital $262,500 per year. For every 20 agency nurses eliminated, a hospital can save more than an estimated $3.1 million annually.
Though a centralized model has its economic benefits, the real value is that standardization can help onboard and retain. Using a comprehensive, clinical information infrastructure solution that includes nursing procedures, clinical decision support, and professional development resources builds a safety net for new nurses, ensuring they have the tools they need to provide safe and effective care and to optimize patient outcomes.
Learn how Lippincott® Solutions can help empower your workforce, easing the transition from education to practice and making retention a reality.
