In long-term and post-acute care communities, hiring good nurses is only one step towards success. The challenge is often keeping great caregivers once you have them.
High staff turnover is a frustrating and costly reality for many senior living communities. Not only does it cost you time and money to train and retrain staff as they come and go, but a lack of consistency in nurses and caregivers can make residents and their families — and even other staff — feel uneasy.
For these reasons, keeping your staff from leaving should be a priority. But if you’re already offering them good pay and benefits, what else can you do?
A lot, actually, if you recognize why nursing burnout and caregiver stress occurs. These four steps can help you create a better work environment and minimize your turnover rate.
1. Allow Your Nurses to Focus on Nursing
You hire your nurses because they’re good at caring for people, not working with spreadsheets. Unfortunately, if they have to spend much of their day in front of a computer screen trying to input information about incidents, they’re not doing what they're best at—and they're more likely to experience burnout.
A QA system that’s designed to minimize administrative time for your nurses is a must if you want to maximize productivity for your valued nursing staff.
2. Foster Staff Confidence by Helping Them Learn from Incidents
Even the best nurses will sometimes be involved in an incident. Falls and other adverse events can make them feel helpless and nervous—especially if they happen repeatedly or if the nurses think they don’t have any way to prevent them.
Use the expertise of expert risk managers who can provide insights into incidents and help identify potential issues before they arise. This allows nurses and caregivers to focus on preventing incidents, not just waiting for another one to occur. QA Reader provides users with professional LTPAC risk managers in real-time who can talk you through incidents and help you work on ways to avoid them.
3. Listen to Staff Concerns
Your nurses and caregivers are the people on the front lines who see what’s happening every day. Do they have the opportunity to communicate with you so you can tackle issues as a team?
This is a crucial aspect of staff retention for senior living facilities. If your staff can provide you with better data about incidents, you can use that data to determine why and how problems arise—and empower your team to prevent adverse events in the future.
Better data is a big step toward effective communication with your team, healthier outcomes for your residents and, ultimately, a more positive work environment that can retain good people. Our case study on Advantage Living Centers provides reveals how better data made a world of difference for their communities.
4. Give Nurses Tools to Reduce Their Stress Levels
Long term and post acute care can be stressful for nurses because residents are often older and more fragile than residents in other health care settings. When an incident occurs, the caregivers involved may experience anxiety, which could eventually prompt them to look for another place to work.
While avoiding all incidents isn’t realistic, you can make dealing with them much less stressful for staff. QA Reader is an incident management system that takes your incident reports and turns them into usable information—without guesswork or fumbling through spreadsheets. It’s user-friendly, intuitive, and time-saving so they can handle the incident efficiently and professionally — and move on.
Find out more about how QA Reader can help senior living communities improve profitability and patient care. Register for our upcoming webinar, Burn Your Spreadsheets Before They Burn You, and see first hand what a good QA system can do for your organization.
