How Nurse Work-Life Balance Leads to Facility Success
Every facility aims to have people working for them who want to be there. Having a nursing staff that feels overworked can disrupt their normal behaviors or feelings which can affect how they interact with patients and coworkers.
While change is inevitable in the healthcare industry, helping your nurses adapt to these transitions are a must. Relying heavily on them to cope on their own will cause low moral and negative feelings — which can impact your facility in an unfavorable way.
A nurse work-life balance is needed so you don’t run good employees into the ground and risk losing their talent.
Nursing Positions Are High in Stress
Every day brings something new, but in nursing, that something new can deliver an immeasurable amount of stress. How a nurse’s workload from day-to-day goes can depend on a few things.
With the shortage, nurses may experience more stress depending on what kind of coverage their facility needs. A facility may be short on nurses during vacations or flu seasons which puts more stress on their unit.
If a facility is short, and they can not bring in their PRN nurse, they may turn to a staffing agency to bring in extra help.
Nurses Work Longer Hours Than Other Jobs Require
Since a typical nursing shift may run 12 or more hours, a nurse’s day exceeds what a typical 9-5 may look like in another field. The facilities a nurse works at may also have some overtime requirements, which could push their hours and days needed on the job even further.
With the nursing shortage, gone are the days when nurses worked fewer days and fewer hours. There used to be more coverage when there were more nurses and not as high of a demand from patients, but now, facilities rely on a basic requirement to fill up their staff.
In order to accomplish proper care with the shortage, facilities have to adopt a safer nurse to patient ratio. This is also due to the extra safety measures needed because of the longer shifts nurses work. For a facility to meet the requirement of a Magnet Hospital, they must meet a minimum nurse to patient ratio of 1:4 during the day.
Traditional facility coverage may stretch a nurse to patient ratio from 1:6 or even 1:8 depending on the size which negativity impacts the care received.
Pressures Negatively Impact a Facility
As mentioned above, the pressures one faces in the medical field due to workload on a unit can negatively impact a facility. Patient and nurse safety is at risk when a facility is running at the wrong ratio. Unfortunate or tragic events can occur to either party when the floor workload is simply too much for the amount of staff at hand.
Helping a nurse work-life balance improve only aides your facility in areas of safety and compliance by making sure your nurses are well-rested for their shifts. Platforms like NurseDash allow you to post openings that your facility needs to fulfill in order to help your staffed nurses avoid burnout.
NurseDash Finds Nurses Without Burning Out the Staff
With NurseDash, you know you are getting qualified nurses to work in your facility. Better yet, the NurseDash platform can match your facility with nurses that are used to working in a similar setting and hours.
This means that your full-time staff can avoid burnout by not feeling obligated to work overtime or shifts that aren’t the best for the nurse work life balance they are wanting.
Facility feedback has said that the per diem nurse you get will be better trained and equipped coming from the NurseDash platform. NurseDash also advocates for facilities to have a safe nurse to patient ratio to provide better care and a better working environment for nurses which leads to better practice. After all, these are licensed professionals, and their own safety and livelihood is just as important as those they care for.
Facilities that use this platform will get their shifts filled. The mobile flexible pricing model allows facilities to inform the nurses when they sign up when they will be there, where they need to go, and how much more they will be paid.
NurseDash partners with local and national educational institutions to help their staff on platforms to grow their digital profiles so you can see how a nurse has progressed through the ranks at any level of; STNA to LPN, LPN to RN, RN to BSN, and so on.
If your facility works with a nurse through the platform for a while and decides to offer them a full-time job, you won’t be charged any placement fee — nor are you required to fulfill a large number of hours before you can hire the nurse full-time.
Register your facility and begin looking for quality nurses with NurseDash today.
