Kathy Sanford, executive vice president and chief nursing officer of CommonSpirit Health, joined the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” to share the results.
“[Virtually integrated care] addresses the nursing shortage, and it lightens the load for our bedside nurses. Our virtual nurses are assisting in all aspects of patient care, and we’re having very, very good results both in the patient care area, the quality and patient experience as well as the experience of nurses,” she said. “That’s going to be so important because the shortages that have alleviated slightly now are going to be back.”
The aging nursing workforce has created a challenge for hospitals and health systems across the country. Nurses are retiring without a strong pipeline to replace them. But new technologies and virtual nursing has allowed some nurses to stay on the job longer while still providing excellent patient care.
“We found that virtual nursing models help us with staffing shortages. Nurses tell us that they don’t want to go anywhere else that doesn’t have virtual nursing,” said Ms. Sanford. “Once people get used to the new ways of taking care of patients, it’s hard for them to go back. It’s going to be hard for people to work for us if we don’t have those tools and those new models in the future.”
CommonSpirit is in the midst of developing their next five-year strategic plan with input from frontline nurses to ensure they’re aligned ahead of the planning process.
“We need to figure out what our assumptions are. We need to figure out how we’re going to meet our mission, and we need to figure out which things we should continue, and which things we should change. We’re pretty excited about that because we did well with the first five years,” said Ms. Sanford.
In addition to virtual nursing, Ms. Sanford said her team will spend more time developing a career pipeline for nursing professionals to ensure they stay engaged and challenged over time. She’s also focused on helping them think strategically.
“We’re spending a little extra time helping our nurse managers and others learn about how you think strategically, because if we don’t learn that, all of us, then we miss an opportunity to do things that we could do to change healthcare in this country and to help our own organization succeed,” she said.