This Is The Best Time To Hire A Nurse For Your Practice

In today's healthcare industry, you're well aware of how tough it is to locate suitable individuals. Due to a growing skills gap and historically low unemployment, hospitals, nursing homes, and other organisations are having trouble filling positions. This dilemma is exacerbated if you're attempting to hire a nurse.

We wanted to understand more about what healthcare organisations are doing to recruit, retain, and expand nursing talent, especially with a predicted 1.2 million nursing shortage by 2022.

Here are a few of the most important and exciting things we learned:

Changes in the Population

Natural demographic shifts in the workforce are making it increasingly difficult to retain and hire nurses in 2018. Every business is dealing with the challenges of an ageing baby boomer population today, and healthcare is no exception, with more than 30% of respondents stating that their teams are mostly in their mid- or late-career stages.

Only about 40% of respondents thought their staff had a good mix of ages. If their workforces don't have a suitable mix of ages, healthcare organisations won't be able to efficiently fill senior posts from within. As a result, companies are required to invest significant resources in attracting, motivating, and to  hire a nurse.

Furthermore, about 35% of respondents say that the majority of their nursing staff consists of millennials or new graduates, meaning that these businesses may lack the resources to effectively train and supervise a young workforce. Because professional growth is still a top employer value proposition for millennials and Gen Z, future recruiting efforts may be more difficult.

Learning and Development

Because unemployment is low and demand is high, to hire a nurse practitioner may be more selective about the companies they want to work for.

Despite the fact that career growth is a top employer value proposition, the results of the poll suggest that employers aren't doing enough to make learning and development a selling feature in job descriptions.

More than half of respondents (56 percent) do not have a clear plan in place for educating and developing their nurses outside of legal compliance requirements.

Furthermore, the responses of our respondents show that many companies are lacking in their coaching and mentoring efforts, with 70% admitting to only having unstructured, casual one-on-one encounters, or none at all. Only about a quarter of those surveyed indicated they had a formalised approach in place for regular one-on-one meetings between nurse managers and team members.

Retention and Vacancy

The most important takeaway from our survey findings is that retention and openings are critical.

More over 40% of those who responded claimed their nursing turnover rate was between 11% and 20%. These firms are having issues not only hire a physician assistant, but also finding new ones when vacancies arise - only around a third of respondents hire a physician assistant at a rate of 10% or less. One-fourth of all hospitals have a nursing vacancy rate of 21 percent or higher, whereas the majority hire a nurse at a rate of 11 percent to 20 percent.

The most concerning feature of these remarks is not the high turnover or vacancy rates, but rather the fact that most businesses are doing little to solve the problem. Only about a quarter of those polled claimed they have a formal nursing retention strategy in place, and nearly 40% stated they don't have one at all.

Take a test drive in our Nexus hr and see for yourself!