The nurse staffing situation – a rocky status quo
“This is the healthcare system I’m aging into. This is the healthcare system that everybody I love is aging into, and we cannot be okay with that status quo.” – Sara Well on in her interview with Valerie Cobb for the Revenue Maze
Sara’s firsthand experience, initially as a nurse and then staffing manager, exposed her to the harsh realities of the behind-the-scenes nursing shortage crisis. Healthcare institutions face staffing struggles as they navigate the workforce shortage in an age plagued by a growing workforce crisis.
Nevertheless, she explains that she is lucky to have worked alongside the nursing staff that her product is championing the cause of. She feels fortunate to have held the hands of real patients who could benefit from Dropstat’s product. Sara notes that statistics demonstrate that patients have lost their lives – as many as 44,000 patients per year – as a result of inefficient healthcare processes, as shown by studies. However:
- Ensuring that these processes are optimized and that the technology is implemented wherever it can be applied will lead to safe staffing ratios, which is so important for safe nursing and,
- Employing adequate staff members will make it easier to detect and respond to signs of emerging complications and health challenges among patients.
Optimized care delivery processes lead to improved patient safety, better patient outcomes, and reduced patient mortality. This is the driving impetus for Dropstat’s vision.
From Nurse Manager to Health Tech
Sara’s epiphany came as she walked through state-of-the-art buildings with the most advanced medical technology and masterfully designed gardens to reach her patients. As she reached her floor, she would be met with short-staffed patient care units struggling to overcome staffing issues. They were using outdated, manual staff-management methods.
Understaffing and staffing inefficiencies were the main reasons that professional, qualified staff nurses could not provide optimal care quality to their patients. This was certainly a challenge before the COVID-19 pandemic and has only grown to be significantly more prominent. That was where the decision to bring better technology into the nurse staffing and scheduling arena was born.
Cross-trained nurses working nearby but not reachable
While working as a nurse staffing manager, she recognized that registered nurses in certain other departments were cross-trained to work on her unit. They were even allowed to do so by policy. However, the call-text-wait system for filling open nursing shifts and the lack of appropriate technology did not enable nurse staffing integration and communication between different care units. The lack of suitable technology meant that even though there were likely internal staff members who were both safer and more cost-efficient, hospital units would be forced to rely on external, more expensive nursing staff to fill open shifts.
Hire the right nurses while maintaining efficiency
Sara explains that the goal of Dropstat is to help healthcare facilities hire enough of the right nurses, firstly, by being aware of what nursing staff they already have, and secondly, to know where and when more staff need to be hired.
Dropstat does not aim to cease using travel nurses or agency nurses but rather to utilize temporary resources in a fairer way to staff nurses and in a more financially efficient way. This can be done with a strategy that supports a healthcare facility’s internal workforce.
Nurse staffing through the call-text-wait system vs. Dropstat
The call-text-wait system is an outdated, error-prone, manual method of staffing. Applying the call-text-wait system detracts from quality nursing care for patients as nursing staff and patients wait for staffing reinforcements to be located and brought on board in real time. It requires significantly more time than automated staffing.
Dropstat is a visionary, AI-powered staff-scheduling product that offers a new approach to automating nurse staffing. It requires less time and effort to reach more staff, and that’s more appropriately trained nursing staff – faster. Dropstat can reach between 10-20X more staff members internally to fill open shifts than by using the manual method.
In addition, through predictive analysis tools, a nursing staff gap can be discovered and remediated in advance.
Leveraging internal nurse staffing to address future staffing shortages
Dropstat offers a potential solution through using internal nurse staffing resources. Sara sees frustration looming in the healthcare system, given the fact that 1,000,000 nurses are expected to age out of nursing within 10 to 15 years. The nursing field would still be unable to fill the demand for nurses even if we set up all the needed nursing schools and nurse educators today. This is another reason hospitals must learn to make the most out of the nursing staff they already have on board and reduce the effects of the nursing crisis in their healthcare facility.
She also explains that ensuring an equal and pre-planned distribution of nurse staffing resources will effectively allow rural hospitals to maintain operations. To quote Sara, “If we think that food deserts are scary, imagine healthcare deserts?”
The future of healthcare is dependent on using health-tech solutions such as Dropstat. This is done by prioritizing effective utilization of internal nurse staffing resources to:
- Reduce the cost of external, higher-cost labor and
- Engaging and retaining staff through more efficient nurse staffing strategies.
Automate nurse staffing resources to avoid increased patient load
The use of automated nurse staffing technology means hospital staff can easily be scheduled to meet patient load pursuant to regulations. When manual methods of staff scheduling are used, nurses must cope with whatever conditions develop each day. Nurses are frequently expected to look after more patients than is desirable, resulting in dangerous nurse-to-patient ratios.
Sara compares the increased patient load on nurses to pilots flying airplanes, explaining that “You can’t physically make a pilot fly two planes at the same time, but somehow, we think that it’s okay to gamble like that with patients’ lives.”
How Dropstat can help ‘heal’ the nurse staffing crisis
The healthcare staffing shortage is spreading, but we can turn to Dropstat to heal our healthcare system.
With Dropstat’s cutting-edge technology, every healthcare facility can schedule nurses efficiently, ensuring that any open shift is filled with nurses of the right discipline. This ensures that every unit or every department is fully staffed and is HPPD compliant.
This also means that nurse staff schedulers and hiring departments know which healthcare staff are already on board and which nurses will need to be hired in advance, thanks to Dropstat’s predictive analysis element.
To learn more about how Dropstat effectively resolves nurse-staffing-related healthcare delivery inefficiencies, visit the Dropstat website.
