While demand for nurses has long outpaced supply, the issue has reached a fever pitch in the past few years. The problem is twofold: First, the number of aging individuals who require nursing care is growing. Second, nurses are leaving the profession in droves. By 2022, there could be as many as 1.2 million registered nursing roles to fill, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
As the nursing shortage continues, it is imperative for healthcare providers to hold on to the nurses they employ. To increase retention, employers need address nurse burnout. To understand why burnout occurs, what it looks like and its consequences, consider a story like Rachel’s.
In a piece for nurse.org, Rachel – a registered nurse in Seattle – explained that her burnout developed slowly, after years of working long, demanding hours as an ICU nurse. For Rachel, a physically and emotionally draining job became her routine. She didn’t have time to stop and consider what that meant in the long term.
But eventually, the consequences hit. In a role where compassion is a key part of the job description, Rachel grew negative. Where she used to feel fulfilled in her work, she viewed it as a chore. Her patience wore thin – both in her personal and professional lives. Her work started to suffer. Rachel’s story illustrates the two-pronged problem of nurse burnout: It extinguishes nurse morale and it impacts patient care.
Preventing burnout: Key action items for healthcare providers
Solving nurse burnout requires acknowledging that it’s not an individual problem. It has nothing to do with the work ethic of nurses like Rachel or the many other competent, high-performing caregivers who experience burnout in their jobs.
Instead, nurse burnout is a direct consequence of administrative processes that leave nurses overworked and underappreciated. Addressing these problems demands process-based, high-level changes. Here’s where healthcare providers can begin:
- Allow for more scheduling flexibility: Inflexible schedules are one of the biggest contributing factors to burnout. When nurses don’t have the freedom to make changes to their intensive schedules, excessively long workweeks become normalized. By using a more agile scheduling system – which a digital workplace platform can offer – healthcare providers can eliminate the feeling of being boxed into an unmanageable workweek.
- Improve internal communications: When nurses feel excluded from high-level health system communications, it only compounds feelings of powerlessness. By consolidating communications on a single, navigable platform, healthcare organizations can provide nurses with an added level of connectivity, which can help them feel more engaged in their work.
- Provide better training: Too often, nurses – particularly traveling nurses – are thrown into a new role without proper training on how to navigate job-related stress. The absence of on-demand, self-service training is a recipe for burnout. Instead, healthcare organizations should carefully evaluate their learning management systems to ensure these processes account not only for patient care, but for the nurses, too. Nurses should emerge from training with a sense of understanding and accomplishment.
As the nursing shortage continues to grow, healthcare providers will face unprecedented challenges to retaining their best talent. With the number of available nurses rapidly dwindling, these nurses will have new leverage, and won’t hesitate to leave burnout-inducing roles. Fortunately for healthcare providers, the opportunities outlined above can be realized with the adoption of a single digital workplace platform that enables and engages the workforce.
For healthcare providers, it’s time to ask whether you have a culture that supports your nurses. And if you don’t, it’s time to build one.
