In a survey conducted last February and March, researchers at the University of Michigan found that 39% of the nurses who responded said they planned to leave the profession within a year. Fries said this is up from previous findings of about 20% in a survey a colleague conducted in December 2019 and January 2020.
The planned departure rate is the highest rate Fries has ever seen in major surveys during her 25 years of nursing. A typical rate is about 10 percent, Fries says.
The survey, which obtained responses from 9,150 nurses, suggests that hospitals could make progress in combating acute nurse staff shortages by focusing more on maintaining, even as they work to attract more people into the nursing profession, Fries said.
Fries advocates that healthcare executives need to “commit to improving staffing over time, and that will be expensive and difficult, but I don’t see them addressing that right now. I see them trying to plug a hole, instead of building for the future.” If hospitals just ramped up their talent pool, he said, nurses would “still leave at the same or faster rate”, unless talent retention issues are also addressed.
“They need to realize that retaining their current nurses needs to be a top priority, otherwise this will be a vicious cycle,” says Fries. “The urgent work in front of healthcare executives is to really actively listen to their employees and act on their concerns, and I don’t see enough of that happening across the state. state and country.”
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Of the 1,224 nurses surveyed by the University of Michigan who recently left their jobs, 70% expressed concerns about the level of staffing. Nearly three-quarters of nurses said they were less likely to quit if the working environment was favorable.
The University of Michigan plans to conduct a follow-up survey this spring or summer, Fries said.
One finding surprised Fries: Planned departure rates were highest for young nurses. Of the licensed nurses who responded to the survey, 59% aged 25 or younger and 53% aged 25 to 35 said they plan to leave their position within a year.
Fries said the high percentage of young nurses planning to leave the profession is particularly worrying.
“It is our future healthcare workforce,” he said. “If they are a recent graduate, we expect them to stay in the nursing workforce for two decades or more. If they have the ability to leave their first position in such a short amount of time, it will really make it difficult for health systems to ramp up staffing.
“Hospitals and health systems spend a lot of money on recruiting (and) orienting new employers, so they will lose that investment very quickly if this rate continues. with our new nurses.”
Concerns about personnel increase
The Michigan Hospitals & Medical Association has estimated that nursing shortages have resulted in hospitals now having 1,700 fewer hospital beds than in 2020. The shortage also results in waiting times in the emergency room. longer and more difficult to transfer patients between care providers. Staffing shortages prompted Trinity Health Muskegon in February to temporarily close a 30-bed unit used to rehabilitate patients after surgery.
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Among the nurses planning to leave, Fries said the most cited reason was inadequate staffing at hospitals, a problem that predated the pandemic. Nurses also cited burnout and workplace violence as their top reasons for wanting to leave the profession.
“Few nurses cite COVID as the main reason for their planned or actual departure,” the researchers wrote in the study. Healthcare paper. “To maintain an adequate nursing workforce in the United States, health systems should make urgent efforts to reduce overtime use, strengthen work environments, implement anti-riot protocols, resources and ensure there are enough staff to meet patient care needs.”
Concerns about inadequate staffing levels have been a common theme in nursing surveys for more than a decade. Many nurses feel that “they are overworked and (have) too few nurses to care for the patients assigned to them,” says Fries. “So it’s not a new finding. I think it’s done with increasing urgency as we’ve gone through the pandemic.”
Nurses who told the University of Michigan that low staffing was the most worrying part of their job were more likely to leave, Fries said.
Fries said wages and benefits are the least-cited reasons why nurses want to leave the profession. In recent contractual arrangements for union nurses in Michigan health systems, “the bottom line is not the pay and benefits that I know of. It’s a commitment to personnel,” he said.
Call for collaboration
Fries suggested that hospitals need to tackle nurse retention in the same way the healthcare industry improves quality and patient safety after a landmark 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine estimated 44,000 to 98,000 people in the United States die each year from preventable medical errors.
Fries advocates that hospitals need to put aside the tendency to compete and collaborate to share best practices for nursing staff retention, similar to how they have implemented safety initiatives. completeness and quality. As an example, he cites identifying a best practice to reduce administrative work for nurses so they can focus more on patient care and possibly improve their job satisfaction. Surname.
“We need a similar effort if we want nursing in Michigan to be the best it can be for the people of Michigan. Identify who is doing well in this area and learn from them, instead of people doing it their own way,” he said. “I don’t think now is the time to use this to compete, but in fact to cooperate. (Let’s) learn from each other so that Michigan is a nurse-friendly state and Michigan is a good place for nurses to work, as opposed to competing on the same people and a smaller group of people. It is not a winning strategy.”
Fries and others who conducted the survey wrote in Medical Care that their findings “show that there is no time to waste” in solving the problem. If not addressed properly, “it is likely that disruptions to the healthcare workforce will worsen, which will trigger an additional cycle of resignations and threaten service delivery.” essential care,” they wrote in the Medical Care article.
The researchers conclude: “Leaders need ethical courage to enact evidence-based strategies to stop the bleeding of registered nurses and enable the health care system Health Care of the United States provides the care that patients expect and deserve.”
This story first appeared in MiBiz.
