WEEK 8 RN COLL DISCUSSION POST REPLY

Retention and Recruitment

Discussion Post Reply

Retaining nurses is a major concern for nurse managers and leaders and I think especially in a variety of healthcare settings in recent years this has become an even bigger concern.  As we learned from our lesson this week, "nurse managers and nurse leaders can promote retention of staff in many different ways, such as listening to the staff, saying thank you for what they do, and role modeling civility" (Marquis & Huston, 2017 p. 39) (Chamberlain, 2023).  I think listening to staff and saying thank you goes a long way.  It's like all things in life; people want to feel like they are heard when it matters and want to feel appreciated.  It's no secret to us that being a nurse can be exhausting.  There can be a lot of demands and long hours feeling heard about the emotions involved, ways to improve staffing and things like nurse to patient ratio goes a long way.  Additionally, feeling appreciated for the hard work that is being put in is a major thing.  No one wants to continue working at a place where they feel under appreciated for their efforts.  To go along with this, according to Finkelman, "identifying staff with competencies and expertise for promotion is an important management responsibility (2018).  Recognizing staff's competencies and their ability to be promoted and move to leadership roles keeps staff motivated and willing to stay because they have goals to works toward and understand their hard work is being noticed.  This is major part of retention in my opinion.

In order to recruit more nurses, I think the most obvious way for managers to do this is through incentive programs.  Hospitals and healthcare facilities across the country are offering sign on bonuses to bring nurses in.  Also, there are incentive programs for current employees to refer nurses to their facilities.  My work is currently offering bonuses to staff for RN referrals and I think this is a common trend as of late for recruitment.  According to Lippincott, some of the ways for managers to recruit nurses is to offer flexible scheduling, compensate accordingly and focus on offering a work-life balance, not just focus on the job.  These are all extremely important factors for recruitment as they play a major part in why someone would accept a job.  No one wants to accept a job that offers low pay, no flexibility and does not allow someone to have balance in their life between work and home-life.  

I think in 50 years there will still be a nurse shortage if changes aren't made.  Hospital administrators need to recognize the conditions nurses work in and if nurses continue to work in areas where they are understaffed and underpaid, more and more nurses will leave the field.  With the right incentive programs, recruitment programs and retention programs then nurses won't have as many reasons to leave jobs.  A local hospital where I'm from recently restructured their pay scale and made market value adjustments.  When doing this, they based wages on years of experience and placed various areas of nursing on levels.  Each nurse was then provided with a graph to show what their pay raise would be for the next 5 years and what it could be with furthering education, certifications and advancing to higher levels of nursing.  I think this was such a valuable move on their part to retain nurses because nurses have a visual and will know what to expect pay wise and their raises won't come as a surprise.  Also, they offered to pay for certifications which makes a huge difference.  If healthcare facilities all had programs set up like this, it would make a huge difference for the future of nursing.

Thank you,

Julie

References:

Finkelman, A. (2020). Leadership and management for nurses: Core competencies for quality care (4th ed.). Pearson.

Chamberlain University. (2023). NR-447 Week 8: Growing the profession. [Online lesson]. Addison, IL.

Ten recruiting strategies to attract nurses: Lippincott Audience Solutions. Back to top. (n.d.). https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/ten-recruiting-strategies-to-attract-nurses