Overcoming 3 top workforce challenges driving RN turnover

Healthcare provider organizations continue to grapple with high rates of nurse turnover, worsening the existing staffing shortages that are impacting quality of care, staff morale, and the bottom line. An annual hospital survey on nursing turnover published in 2023 revealed some disturbing statistics:

• • The average national turnover rate in 2022 for staff RNs was 22.5%
  • The average cost of turnover for a staff RN is $52,350, a 13.5% increase from the prior year
  • Over half of hospitals reported an RN vacancy rate of 15%
  • Each percentage change in turnover results in an annual cost or savings of $380,600 for the average hospital

Furthermore, it takes between two to four months to recruit an experienced RN, and some departments are potentially turning over their entire RN staff in less than five years. Post-acute providers are faring even worse with an average turnover rate of almost 40% among RNs, LPNs, and CNAs in 2022.

Clearly, acute and post-acute provider leadership must find effective ways to ameliorate their biggest challenges related to nurse turnover. This blog post covers three top workforce challenges and how Inovalon workforce management solutions can help healthcare organizations overcome them.

Challenge #1: Preventing burnout and boosting morale

Hospital CEOs identified RN shortages and staff burnout as two of their biggest workforce challenges in a 2022 survey. So it comes as no surprise that in a survey of nurses who had recently left their direct patient care roles, respondents shared that “not being valued,” “unmanageable workloads,” and “no work-life balance” were top factors in their decision to leave.

Provider organizations need to find ways to boost job satisfaction and morale. Effective ways to provide staff nurses with more balance and control include:

• • Implementing more collaborative staffing and scheduling processes
  • Eliminating the stress of understaffing and last-minute call offs by making it easy to fill open shifts
  • Making more effective, data-driven decisions to ease workloads

Schedule Management streamlines nurse scheduling processes and helps management make more effective, data-driven decisions to decrease overtime, prevent burnout, and reduce turnover by:

• • Easing patient care staff work burdens with anytime, anywhere scheduling and credentialing access that enables shift managers to ensure the right skills are matched with the right units at the appropriate nurse to patient ratio
  • Enabling your nursing staff to view and manage their schedules from a mobile device, sync their work and personal calendars, and get instant text or email notifications of open shifts, schedule changes, and announcements.
  • Empowering staff to improve work-life balance with the ability to self-schedule, trade shifts, or proactively fill open shifts through a mobile, cloud-based application

Challenge #2: Keeping up with credentialing requirements

According to American Hospital Association’s Regulatory Overload Report, health systems, hospitals, hospital-affiliated outpatient service providers, and post-acute care providers spend about $39 billion annually administrating compliance with 629 requirements, including ensuring providers and RN staff are properly licensed and credentialed.

With high turnover rates, credentialing compliance becomes especially burdensome – necessitating more administrative time for nurse managers and staff in charge of scheduling. The administrative burden takes staff time away from caring for patients and contributes to a less optimal work experience.

With noncompliance penalties on the line, staying on top of credential, license, and certification requirements while ensuring up-to-date status for both staff AND individual shifts is crucial. Provider organizations cannot afford for it to be a manual, time-consuming process.

Credential Management streamlines the collection, organization, and tracking of staff licenses and certifications, helping healthcare provider organizations stay on top of expirations and continuing education needs to ensure staff can maintain quality care and meet position requirements.

Challenge #3: Eliminating data siloes

During the KLAS sixth annual Digital Health Investment Symposium, providers revealed “a lack of true interoperability and poor integration and scalability of disparate point solutions exacerbate staff burnout and contribute to problems with training and retaining talent.”

Providers of all types and sizes can overcome interoperability challenges with Inovalon’s suite of workforce management tools. By bundling Schedule Management with Credential Management, provider organizations can eliminate siloed workforce management solutions, enabling them to gain visibility into departments, shifts, employees, licenses, certifications, risk areas, and budget impacts – all in one integrated solution.

Your organization can benefit from advanced capabilities such as:

• • The ability to view and manage staffing system-wide from one screen
  • Instant updates across the system whenever scheduling changes are made
  • A real-time view into up-to-the-minute staffing situations
  • Simplified integrations with other HR systems
  • 24/7 access to WFM data, including missing, upcoming, or expired credentials, which could affect work assignment eligibility

Discover first-hand how you can improve job satisfaction by empowering nurses to take charge of their schedules and clear administrative hurdles to maintaining quality patient care.

Schedule a demo today!

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