Resources help you take action now
Resources help you take action now
Here’s how to ease the nursing shortage
The nation’s health care delivery system is staggering under the weight of patient unrest over managed care policies and an impending nursing shortage that threatens to strike right at the heart of the quality of direct patient care. Several health care professional associations and publishing groups have stepped up to the plate and developed resources to help define and address the problems facing health care in America — including the pressing issue of how to retain and recruit qualified nurses.
1. COR Health in Santa Barbara, CA, recently released Nurse Recruitment & Retention Strategies 2001 — a compendium of best practices in nurse recruitment and retention edited by Deloras Jones, RN, MS, designed to help health care organizations develop strategies to maintain quality patient care in an increasingly tight labor market. Topics covered in this resource include:
- building and sustaining an optimal workforce during the coming nursing shortage;
- successful nurse recruitment efforts in the past three years;
- key benefits nurses are looking for;
- how a consortium of providers collaborated to develop their own specialty-trained nurses;
- the impact of recruitment and retention efforts on patient outcomes and the bottom line.
The book costs $189. For more information, visit www.corhealth.com\nrrs.html.
2. The American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) in Washington, DC, has published several resources to help define the impact of the nursing shortage and to help organizations fight back. AONE initiated the Nurse Recruitment and Retention Study in 1999. This exploratory study includes interviews with 58 nursing and human resource administrators nationwide at community and academic acute care hospitals. It presents practical information on approaches to finding and retaining qualified nurses. The report costs $75 for non-AONE members and $35 for members. Request #WS-154301.
Perspectives on the Nursing Shortage: A Blueprint for Action is an AONE monograph to help nurse executives, health care administrators, and others understand federal, state, and regional policies related to the nurse workforce. The monograph provides a national overview of the problem, as well as analyses of unique state, regional, and local situations. It also includes information on current federal, state, and regional nursing workforce legislation and recommendations for national and state policy makers. Issues covered include:
- national trends in employment and earnings of nursing personnel;
- the current nursing shortage;
- the impending shortage;
- recommendations for reversing the shortage.
The 75-page monograph costs $80 for non-AONE members and $45 for members. Request #WS-154195.
A companion piece to the monograph above, "Discussion Toolkit for Perspectives on the Nursing Shortage: A Blueprint for Action," is designed to assist nurse leaders in explaining and discussing the nursing shortage within their organizations and their communities. Each packet includes a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, overheads, speakers’ notes, discussion questions, and the executive summary of the monograph. The kit costs $40 for non-AONE members and $30 for members. Request #WS-154196.
3. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, DC, recently released Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. The report makes several recommendations to redesign and improve the quality of health care in the United States. Recommendations include:
- Provide care based on continuous healing relationships, or 24-hour care delivered over the Internet, telephone, and other means, as well as face-to-face.
- Decision making should be evidence-based.
- Information should be transparent to patients and families.
- Patients should have free access to their own medical information.
- Patients should be the source of control over health care decisions that affect them.
- Patient safety should be ensured.
- System waste should be reduced.
The 300-page report costs $44.95 plus shipping and handling. To order, call (800) 624-6242. The report can also be read on-line at www.nap.edu. Once on the web site, type "chasm" in the search title box.
4. A coalition of nursing associations, which includes the American Nurses Association and the American Organization of Nurse Executives, both based in Washington, DC, banded together as the Tri-Council to propose changes and enhancements to the education, work environment, legislation and regulation, technology, research data and collection currently aimed at attracting and retaining nurses.
The Tri-Council’s white paper, Strategies to Reverse the New Nursing Shortage, first defines the nursing shortage citing numerous studies in the literature and data from state and federal sources, and then suggests strategies to address and reverse this troubling trend. Tri-Council recommendations include:
- motivating nurses to seek higher education through career progression initiatives;
- redesigning work to allow older nurses to remain active in direct care roles;
- compensation tied to education and the promotion of staff development programs;
- advocating for increasing nursing education funding under Title VIII of the Public Health Service Act and other publicly funded initiatives;
- investigating the potential for using technological advances to enhance the capacity of a reduced nursing workforce.
More information on the white paper is available on the web sites of the participating organizations including www.ana.org, www.nln.org [the New York City-based National League for Nursing], and www.aone.org.
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