There are no easy or fast solutions to the nursing shortage.
However, universities, healthcare facilities, and the government can take steps to move things in the right direction.
Improving education, workplace conditions, technology, and legal aspects of nursing can lessen the impact of the shortage.
The following section provides several solutions to the nursing shortage.
Implementing these solutions can help patients receive adequate care and ensure nurses obtain sufficient support.
How to Improve Healthcare Workplace Conditions:
- Develop systems to accommodate employee needs
- Prioritize communication among nurses to address concerns
- Focus on leadership/management, mentoring, and support
- Adequately staff departments
- Incentivize performance
- Acknowledge employee’s hard work
- Utilize beneficial technology
1. Improve Education
One of many healthcare institutions’ most significant challenges is getting more nurses into the field.
This issue results from a shortage of skilled nursing instructors and limited educational resources.
Some nurses who move into education experience a pay cut or limited possibilities to make additional income.
They may also see other benefits and compensation reductions compared to different nursing specializations.
In addition to compensation challenges, many nurse educators and faculty are retiring or reaching retirement age.
It includes university professors, associate professors, and assistant professors with MSN and Doctorate degrees.
Finally, MSN and doctoral programs are not producing a sufficient supply of viable nurse educators to support education.
This mixture of financial issues, a retirement surge, and insufficient resupply of nurse educators is causing further shortage issues.
Improving Funding for Nursing School Programs
Many colleges and universities find it challenging to compel more nurses to become instructors/professors.
Increasing nursing school funding will incentivize more nurses to become educators and fill vacant nurse professor jobs.
More nurse educators in the field mean more qualified nursing students can enter the program and obtain their licenses.
However, the budget must address financial and compensatory challenges that prevent nurses from becoming educators.
More significant funding also ensures nursing students have adequate resources to succeed in the nursing program.
It includes academic resources, professor-to-class ratios, tutoring, seating availability, online support, and other resources.
Nevertheless, increasing campus resources, teacher capacity, and nursing programs isn’t an easy task.
It requires academic and government incentives that incentivize more nurses to become educators.
Sufficient funding allows institutions to turn away fewer students and create more successful nursing school graduates.
The increase in graduates and registered nurses will help fill vacant hospital and healthcare facility jobs.
In turn, we’ll see more growth throughout the nursing industry, from patient care to education and technology.
Improving education funding and allocation for nursing programs requires taking several necessary steps.
Firstly, institutions must offer educators enough incentives to accept teaching roles rather than other nursing occupations.
They must also increase school funding to ensure enough educational resources exist to support more nursing students.
A more significant budget enables campuses to expand to accept a greater capacity of nursing students.
The legal, financial, and academic aspects of improving education are complicated.
Nevertheless, it’s necessary to sufficiently replace the retiring healthcare workforce with freshly qualified registered nurses.
Working with government and state bodies to improve spending and academic allocation is vital for nursing school funding.
How to Resolve Common Nursing Education Issues:
- Incentivize more nurses to become educators/professors
- Improve nursing school enrollment opportunities for students
- Increase education budgets to provide students with more academic resources
- Coordinate with the government to expand nursing school programs and funding
- Work with the state to address nurse faculty shortage issues
- Establish legislation to address national nursing shortage reform issues
2. Improve Workplace Conditions
Improving workplace conditions is one crucial area of the nursing shortage that organizations can quickly implement.
Healthcare organizations must communicate with staff to resolve critical issues and improve employee satisfaction.
Acknowledging concerns, providing feedback, rewarding performance, and investing in technologies help reduce stress.
Excellent communication also ensures employees feel their concerns are a priority.
As a result, they’ll experience better morale and support, allowing them to provide optimal patient care.
Besides that, healthcare facilities must invest in good managers.
They’ll help employees perform well by providing leadership/guidance, aid, and structure.
They’ll also reduce turnover because the nursing team will receive adequate support.
Healthcare centers with adequate staffing go a long way toward reducing employee stress and improving patient care.
Nevertheless, they must invest in technologies to improve delegation, automation, patient care, workflow, and management.
It enables nurses to get more work accomplished more effectively and efficiently.
Address Staff Concerns and Needs Promptly
A healthcare facility’s ability to address staff concerns and needs impacts long-term performance and employee morale.
Employees in all sectors perform better, report more job satisfaction, and make fewer errors when their needs are addressed.
In addition, employees are less likely to quit, create an unhealthy workplace culture or avoid challenging managing tasks.
Healthcare can be hectic, making it difficult to manage multiple healthcare staff effectively and address every concern.
However, it’s essential to meet the needs of employees to ensure all areas of the institution receive sufficient support.
A hospital or healthcare facility is only as strong and competent as its nurses, specialists, and other medical staff.
Prioritize Nurse Retention
Understanding why nurses quit their jobs and addressing these issues improve employee retention immensely.
Maintaining highly qualified employees is much less expensive and time-consuming than frequently replacing staff.
Healthcare facilities that successfully maintain nurses spend less money and time training new employees.
Long-term nurses establish positive cultures and teamwork by developing thriving connections and support systems.
Employees understand each other’s needs efficiently, easily delegate assignments, and manage patients with fewer errors.
Good corporation and coordination can take months or years to develop among colleagues.
Each employee a healthcare facility has to replace creates communication, delegation, and timeliness gaps.
It also increases the odds of risks as newer employees may not understand specific policies, protocols, and practices.
Therefore, keeping nurses employed long-term is better for patient care, employee morale, and healthcare expenditures.
Establish a Healthy Workplace Culture
Previously I mentioned that maintaining hospital staff long-term can improve many facets of the healthcare facility.
Nevertheless, it’s important to mention that workplace culture results from employees’ attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives.
Keeping bad employees or inadequate managers in impactful positions can negatively impact workplace culture.
Employees feed off of each other’s moods, morals, words, and behavior.
Identifying whether issues result from poor management, insufficient staff support, or particular employees is vital.
Good leadership understands the causes of workplace culture issues and works jointly to address the problems sufficiently.
They concentrate on removing the root of the problem and strengthening and supporting the community.
Workers who remain happily employed for extended periods have a deeper understanding of their job duties and team.
As a result, healthcare facilities save costs on training employees and integrating them into a positive workplace culture.
Provide Adequate Support and Leadership
A healthcare facility’s ability to address employee concerns and manage staff connects directly to the leaders they develop.
A well-rounded management team ensures their nurses and healthcare workers receive adequate support.
Nurse support can take form in numerous ways.
- Investing in exemplary leadership
- Creating mental health programs
- Addressing nurse concerns promptly
- Subsidized tools and equipment costs
- Assisting with career development
- Incentivizing good performance
- Offering training and academic resources
- Providing positive/constructive feedback
- Ensuring nurses receive adequate breaks
- Hiring sufficient staff to accommodate patients
- Minimizing over delegation
- Addressing common causes of burnout
- Offering competitive wages
- Maintaining some scheduling flexibility
- Provide childcare solutions
- Prioritize safety
- Focus on employee well-being
- Form support groups and mentorships
- Survey nurses for support feedback
The better a healthcare institution supports its nurses and specialists, the more likely it will sustain staff long-term.
In addition, employee performance and morale will increase, and medical errors and patient wait times will decrease.
Incentivize Good Performance
Recognizing hard work and offering appropriate incentives is vital to maintain employee satisfaction.
Showing appreciation to essential employees keeps them motivated to improve and sustain their performance.
It also demonstrates to other employees that hard work and performance can provide numerous opportunities.
Common incentives include sign-on bonuses, referral payouts, performance perks, and college/clothing reimbursement.
Other incentives comprise premium parking, free apparel/scrubs, additional paid time off, and public acknowledgments.
There are many options to incentivize good performance and create a positive work culture.
Nevertheless, it’s highly beneficial to consult the nursing departments to determine what incentives work best for them.
Implement Helpful Technologies and Procedures
Helpful technologies, systems, and procedures enable registered nurses to do more assignments with less stress.
As a result, these technologies reduce nurse burnout, medical errors, and patient waiting times.
Automation software, communication technologies, and patient flow systems help nurses manage duties more efficiently.
They also enable better communication, collaboration, and delegation of essential assignments and responsibilities.
The more effective these technologies are, the smoother the task management process and patient care procedures will be.
Healthcare institutions can implement numerous technologies and systems to improve performance and patient care.
The following section will thoroughly discuss the benefits of utilizing healthcare-focused technologies in institutions.
3. Develop and Utilize New Technologies
Technology is a vital component of the nursing profession because it affects many aspects of performance and patient care.
It allows nurses to communicate more effectively with the team to coordinate tasks and responsibilities.
It also provides patients with better care by helping nurses complete assignments faster and remain organized and updated.
Advancing communication and technologies enables nurses to complete more work in less time with less effort.
As a result, it leads to better care by empowering nurses to spend more time concentrating on what’s truly important.
Entrepreneurs, healthcare facilities, legal institutes, and government agencies must create technologies to aid nurses.
The goal isn’t to reduce nursing sizes but to help nurses become more productive and effective.
In turn, they’ll experience less stress by simplifying demanding tasks and automating healthcare problems.
These are just a few brief examples of how technology can improve the current state of the nursing shortage.
There are countless ways to utilize technology to improve patient flow, system automation, task management and delegation, scheduling, education, and other vital aspects of healthcare.
Accordingly, it’s essential to focus on education, workplace optimization, and legal and technological areas of nursing and healthcare.
Ways to Improve Technology:
- Create better systems of automation
- Develop better communication technology
- Utilize software to simplify complex tasks
- Improve patient flow procedure systems
- Enhance monitoring devices, record keeping, and telehealth
How to Improve the Nursing Shortage
The nursing shortage may sound like an overwhelming problem that’s extremely challenging to solve, and it can be.
However, there are numerous ways to reduce the impacts of the shortage.
It requires better systems, technologies, institutions, and education systems to accommodate nurses and students.
It also requires government assistance to help fund the education needed to qualify and educate more nursing students.
There aren’t enough slots for students to enroll in nursing school to offset the retiring nurses.
As a result, the demand for nurses will continue to grow, and healthcare systems will remain strained.
The nursing workforce also requires support with mental health, task management/delegation, automation, and leadership.
It’s essential to accommodate nurses’ needs to address common concerns and reduce turnover and burnout.
Better systems and communication enable nurses to complete more work in less time with less stress.