Focusing on Healthcare Jobs Retention Problems

Limited acceptance into nursing school and a group of RNs nearing retirement age has caused serve issues for employers. Since finding enough professionals to fill many healthcare jobs has become a serious problem, many hospital administrators are now focusing even harder on retention than ever before.

According to the Kansas City Star, the state is expected to have a supply of nurses that has decline by 2.3 percent in 2020. At the same time, the demand is expected to increase by 25.6 percent, making it extremely important for employers to hold on to ever nurse that they can.
The newspaper also found that 13 percent of nurses make the decision to leave their career each year. This means that more than 9 percent of the positions for this healthcare job continue to be unfilled.

In an effort to encourage nurses to stick with the career and battle burnout, many employers are now offering better benefits, higher salaries and more training.

Susan Lacey, who is the director of nursing work force and systems analysis at Children's Mercy Hospital, told the newspaper that a new center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Nursing plans to address the problem in a variety of different ways over the course of the next two years.

The center plans to conduct a comprehensive survey of all of the local hospitals and clinics in order to find out which facilities have issues that need to be improved in order to keep nurses around. It also plans to create a Clinical Scene Investigator (CSI) Academy in order to provide education and technical support to those in the profession. They will also share the results of the survey and CSI Academy at an up-coming conference devoted to nursing work-force innovation.

"We believe the center will serve as a national model for strategic innovation in health-care transformation," Lacey told the newspaper. "It truly is one of a kind. We believe we can meet the demands with the available resources if we help to improve the environment in which nurses are working."