Content area
Full Text
Nursing satisfaction rises, turnover drops
While hospital discharge planners make certain each patient's discharge and transition in care are handled with quality of care and safety in mind, it's the job of hospital operations chiefs to make certain the entire process runs smoothly and efficiently.
A poorly run discharge process might result in high nursing dissatisfaction and turnover, bed census swings between high vacancies and overcrowding, and wasteful resource spending.
For instance, when nurses feel their staff-to- patient ratio is too high, they are unhappy and will not stay long at their jobs, says Michael Bundy , MBA, vice president of operations support at Wellmont Health System in Kingsport, TN.
At another Tennessee hospital, Bundy had overseen a discharge process restructuring that resulted in a major change in nursing turnover rates.
"We went from 100 vacancies and 70 contract nurses to 12 vacancies and no contract labor," Bundy says. "We were saving hundreds of thousands of dollars."
The 544-bed hospital also saw a decrease in its length of stay (LOS) from an average of 5.2 days with a case mix acuity level of 1.6 to an average LOS of 4.4 days with a case mix acuity level of 1.7, Bundy says.
"So, the hospital had a higher acuity level with a shorter length of stay and still maintained all beds full," he adds.
The hospital's volume has remained high, above 90% of beds occupied, despite the economy having impacted demand through surgery postponements, Bundy notes.
"We are seeing a decline in volume, but we're still above 90%," he says.
Before making changes in discharge...