Staff Management

The Challenge

A large metropolitan hospital is experiencing an increased turnover of ICU nurses due to long hours and first-year burnout. Nurses scheduled for 12-hour shifts are often working 3-5 additional hours to fill gaps left by sick nurses missing work. Often the ICU is so busy that there is no time for someone to make calls and locate replacements before the next shift begins, forcing the current staff to stay on duty way past their shift ends. The hospital needs a way to fill these gaps without the placing the burden of this challenge on the nurses.

Nurse No-Show and Nurse Turnover are key “Never Events” for hospitals to manage.

Benefits of Solving

Solving this challenge will benefit the hospital in the following ways:

checkThe task of finding replacement nurses is taken out of the hands of the ICU staff, freeing them to care for patients and leave when their shift ends

checkHospitals will decrease their liability of patient care errors by avoiding short-staffed shifts, or shifts covered by overworked and exhausted nurses

checkFewer overtime hours worked and an increase in nurse retention will result in significant savings for the hospital in payroll, future recruitment and training

Solution

Using Quicklert Connect App, the medical facility can literally touch one button to engage and bring in the necessary staff resources when nurses call in prior to the start of their shift to notify the shift manager they will not be coming into work.

checkThe hospital maintains a database of those nurses who can work specific shifts. This information is then used to create Groups

checkA Group can be all nurses who said they can work Tuesdays during the day shift, or all nurses who said they can be available on Fridays on the night shift.

checkEach Group is populated with available nurses for that day and that shift

checkWhen necessary, a lead nurse or manager simply accesses the application, and types a request for nurses for the specific day and shift. They then target that message to the appropriate pre-designated group

checkAll nurses in that group receive the request-for-work, and can either hit the Acknowledge button on the Quicklert Connect mobile app to accept the shift, or Reply with their own message to accept the shift.

checkNo phone calls, no calling trees, no time wasted by important resources making phone calls or sending out multiple texts. No additional hidden costs