The dramatic changes the healthcare industry faces today have had a significant impact on providers nationwide, especially nurses.
Across the United States, health systems face mounting issues related to the nursing workforce, including high turnover and a projected shortfall of more than half a million registered nurses by 2030. Across healthcare, nurses leaving the profession cite poor practice environments, emotional/moral distress, fatigue and exhaustion, troublesome work schedules, lack of general respect and appreciation, lack of voice, lack of career development, and lack of intellectual challenges/stimulation.
The healthcare industry has begun to research, explain and work to improve clinician/physician burnout. But what about the nursing community, which serves as the driving force of provider safety, outcomes and efficiency? It's interesting to consider what is possible for all levels of the provider hierarchy if we empower nurses to work at the top of their license. While some healthcare organizations have pockets of excellence for nursing, no one has yet transformed their nursing workforce to enable nurses to have a voice, high engagement and partnership in improving health for their patients and consumers.
Ascension clinical leaders have been working together to understand the impact of practice environments on the engagement and morale of nurses and how health systems across the world can improve in this area. This vision led to the implementation of the Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence, a new model for providing clinically excellent, safe, compassionate and personalized care in ways designed to satisfy the needs of the nursing workforce while responding to and proactively preparing for the changing trends and expectations in the healthcare landscape.
We realize that not only must we transform the care for those we are privileged to serve to address the quadruple aim related to health outcomes, patient experience, provider experience and lower cost. We also must transform to meet the needs and expectations of nurses and other caregivers.
The Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence will focus on:
- Building a professional practice environment that respects all members of the care team, delivers on the quadruple aim and is scalable to multiple practice environments.
- Operating an innovation center to positively disrupt and iterate on the current nursing model and nursing practice.
- Providing coaching and career sponsorship to enable nurses to advance and grow through their career.
- Investing in nursing and caregiver leadership development, competencies and capabilities.
- Managing the resilience and well-being of nurses, including their own healthcare.
- Welcoming the knowledge application and clinical reasoning skills of nurses.
- Developing and measuring new approaches through evidence-based practice and human centered design research.
- Implementing a communication strategy that reaches and engages frontline nurses in a manner that is consistent with the way they want to communicate.
- Actively planning for the workforce of the future.
In addition, creating and developing new ways to measure and receive feedback from nurses will create actionable data that provides early indicators of joy and burnout. Success will be measured by:
- Decrease in turnover and vacancy rates.
- Improvement in HCAHPS scores and other measures of person/family engagement and satisfaction.
- Improvement in joy and reduction in fatigue.
- Improvement in all appropriate metrics of quality, patient safety and harm.
- Reduction in associate safety-related incidents, events, and days away, restricted or transferred (DART).
To mitigate burnout and return joy to the nursing profession, leaders must be guided by a vision to develop and sustain a culture of clinical innovation, professional respect, team engagement and collaboration, and flourishing of individuals and the workplace community. A health system's culture can be truly differentiated by positioning nurses as leaders and innovators who work in collaboration with all members of the interdisciplinary team. This work will advance the health of those we serve and help to transform healthcare across the United States.