As leaders have been rounding and talking with caregivers, they’re hearing many questions about nurse staffing. Here’s an update.
“Intermountain is working on a variety of both short- and long-term solutions to help with our staffing needs,” says Amy Christensen, vice president and chief nursing officer for Specialty-based Care.
First, we’re creating a robust float pool. At Intermountain Medical Center, one of the hospitals with a higher number of COVID-19 patients, the float pool recently hired 40 nurses for all specialty areas in the hospital. “We’ll continue to hire to meet the needs across the system,” says Amy. “New float pool nurses are already taking shifts at IMC and strengthening the team.”
Second, we’re coordinating traveling nurses for both med/surg and ICUs. This group of agency nurses will allow us to respond more quickly to staffing needs across the system, while also being qualified to fill roles in some of our more specialized and unique units. Additionally, it allows us to flex our staff down in the future when the census drops and as we may have new caregivers onboarded.
“While contract nurses are a short-term solution, part of their value lies in their ability to provide a much-needed reprieve for our existing caregivers,” Amy says. “Rather than floating caregivers from one unit or facility to another, travelers provide a new pool of skilled caregivers and relief where it’s most needed.”
Intermountain is continuing to hire nurse positions and identifying opportunities to redeploy called-off caregivers. Some actions Intermountain is taking to address nurse staffing include:
- Incentive pay for nurses to take extra shifts is available. This has been approved and is available by request for nursing departments.
- Hiring new nurses.
- Reaching out to recent nurses who have retired. HR has been contacting this population to see if they will come back temporarily to help in med/surg or ICU units.
- Reaching out to nurses at Primary Children’s Hospital to ask if they will cross train and help on adult units.
- Reaching out to all nurses working in non-clinical roles to encourage refresher courses and updates to allow for work at the bedside.
- Nurses and PCTs are working an extra 12-hour shift per month.
A daily staffing huddle has also been implemented to discuss key metrics and staffing ratios across Intermountain.
There’s no hiring freeze for nursing positions. A new evaluation process has been defined for all new hire requests. This new process ensures the hiring process is efficient and, using other data, identifies whether resources already exist and may simply need to be reallocated, which could speed the process of filling open positions.
“We’ve never stopped posting nursing positions throughout the pandemic and are actively hiring new caregivers using this new process,” Amy says. “We’ll continue to replace positions needed to care for our patients. We’ve also experienced an unusually high absenteeism rate related to both COVID and non-COVID reasons, which, combined with higher than usual volumes, has exacerbated current staffing shortages. I want to sincerely thank all caregivers for the way they’re stepping up to help during this time.”