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| About six months ago, top officials at San Angelo Community Medical Center in Texas asked a committee of nurses what the hospital needed to do to keep them from leaving. Almost no one mentioned money. Instead, as administrators listened slack-jawed, nurse after nurse talked about broken equipment, inflexible schedules, confusion among new graduates, patients rushed through the system and constant work with little recognition. "Treat us as people. That was what a lot of the complaints came down to," said Vicki Crouch, RN, a staff nurse at San Angelo who is on the committee. "Give us what we need to do our jobs the way we want to do them." Flexibility
and listening After cutting staff and eliminating mentoring programs in the 1980s, hospitals are reaping a bitter harvest of overworked staffs, distrust of management and inexperienced nurses burnt out from taking on too much too quickly, said Kay McVay, RN, president of the California Nurses Association. Add that to a nursing shortage and a host of new opportunities for people with nursing degrees – from consulting to home care to the Internet – and many hospital nurses are deciding they don’t have to take it anymore. "I’d had it," said Sheryl Picco, RN, of Pleasant Hill, Calif., a 28-year veteran of acute care who left a Northern California hospital in March. Picco, now a legal nurse consultant and part-time teacher, said her emergency room nursing staff was cut from four to three and given extra duties without thanks or acknowledgement. "The reason I stayed as long as it did was because I loved the patients and I loved the people on my shift," she said. "Something has got to change," she added. Writing
on the wall "It’s hard to develop good team spirit when your players are rotating off the team all the time," AONEpresident Lois L. Kercher, DNSc, RN, said. Nurse managers need to let the nurses who work for them know that their work and opinions are valued, Kercher said. They should have as much input as possible into decisions that affect them. For instance, she encourages each of the units at her hospital in Virginia to arrange their own shifts. "My time schedules look like a patchwork quilt, but that’s something that gives nurses satisfaction. They feel they can control their schedules to meet their own needs," she said. Many hospitals have started or reinstated orientation programs for new graduates to ease the transition from nursing school to the hospital floor. Idealistic young nurses often have a romanticized view of hospital work, said Julie Fairman, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, an associate professor at the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Mentoring programs like the one at the University of Pennsylvania Health System match new graduates with experienced clinical nurses who can help them with anything from patient care to dealing with common workplace problems. Crouch said administrators at San Angelo seem to have taken to heart the lessons of their meetings with the nurse committee. They hold regular staff appreciation buffets – catered by the administrators themselves – and prize drawings. They’ve established an employee recognition program and mentoring program for new nurses. They are making sure broken computers and machines get fixed. And one day when Crouch’s day-surgery unit had an unusually heavy patient load, the administration brought in pizza because they knew no one would have time to go out for lunch. Most important, Crouch said, they seem to listen and follow through when she or another nurse comes to them with a problem. "I’m to the point where I trust them," she said. "We’ve got people at the top who are doing whatever they can to do what’s right for the patients and what’s right for the employees." Sounds like a recipe for retention. |
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