Patient satisfaction is greatly impacted by healthcare staffing, because all care and services are delivered to the patient by members of the healthcare workforce -- nurses, physicians, allied professionals, leadership, and support and nonclinical personnel.
Today's recruiters at healthcare organizations are facing intense competition for talent in an increasingly complex environment, which impacts internal employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and ultimately the bottom line.
The greatest opportunity for improving healthcare recruitment often resides with workforce solutions experts outside the healthcare enterprise itself. These strategic partners can deliver recruitment strategies to healthcare organizations that improve the entire talent acquisition process through precision sourcing strategies, a larger and more diverse network of healthcare professionals, increased resource capacity, and clinical expertise. As a result, care providers can hire quality candidates quickly and efficiently while managing costs and ensuring a successful cultural fit.
Here's how recruitment partnerships can solve staffing challenges that impact the patient experience:
Time-to-fill
Gaps in clinical staffing can stretch already thin coverage for nursing and other staff, resulting in morale problems, a worsening work environment, employee burnout, and even patient care and safety issues. Research clearly shows that staffing ratios are related to patient satisfaction, and it's easy to see why. Strategies that can fill gaps in clinical staffing more quickly can therefore help improve patient satisfaction levels.
A recruitment partnership can significantly speed up the time it takes to fill staffing gaps through access to larger databases of quality clinicians, customized recruitment strategies including social media campaigns, clinical and compliance expertise, and advanced sourcing technology. Recruitment strategies by AMN Healthcare have documented 25%-50% reductions in time-to-fill for many healthcare providers.
Quality
Patient satisfaction has been linked to the quality of nursing skills, specifically to higher proportions of registered nurses with Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degrees in a provider's workforce. The landmark 2010 report by the Institute of Medicine, The Future of Nursing, recommended an increase in the proportion of nurses with BSN degrees, because nurses are working on the front lines of patient care in an increasingly complex healthcare environment and with a growing number of patients suffering from multiple chronic conditions. Therefore, more nurses should have higher levels of education and training to provide the best patient care and to create the best patient experience.
A recruitment partnership can provide healthcare organizations with more BSN-prepared nurses. Recruitment strategies experts whose entire focus and resources are dedicated to quality staffing have a much larger database of healthcare professionals than individual hospitals or health systems can maintain. The database of AMN Healthcare includes more than a million practitioners, the largest in the nation, and that includes a high percentage of BSN-prepared nurses. This database is maintained and constantly enriched by advanced, technology-driven sourcing processes, which are difficult for healthcare providers to replicate. Recruitment strategies can be customized to provide healthcare organizations with the unique mix of degreed nurses they require. AMN recruitment strategies have produced results that include 75% BSN-prepared nurses hired with an average of 8 years of experience.
HCAHPS Scores
The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is the nation's first standardized, large-scale, publicly reported measurement of patient satisfaction with hospital care; it's used to determine value-based reimbursements from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and also for comparisons of patient care in the highly competitive healthcare industry environment.
The link between HCAHPS and healthcare staffing has received considerable attention among researchers, who have found that the quality of the nurse work environment, including staff ratios, are significantly related to patients' ratings and recommendations of hospitals. The HCAHPS questionnaire is dominated by questions correlated to staffing, targeting the care and service delivered by clinical and nonclinical personnel.
Staffing improvements achieved through a recruitment partnership can increase the likelihood of positive answers to many of the HCAHPS survey queries, because improvements in time-to-fill, quality and matching candidates to organizational culture will enhance the clinical work environment.
Workforce solutions experts such as AMN Healthcare have developed recruitment strategies that can meet the growing talent acquisition challenges that healthcare organizations now face. AMN recruitment strategies can quickly fill staffing gaps and ensure quality hires, resulting in an improved overall care environment and better patient satisfaction.
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