Retention continues to be a hot topic in the world of nursing. Whether you are a staff nurse (or soon to be) or a seasoned nurse manager, the following excerpt from HCPro’s newsletter The Staff Educator, can help get the retention wheels turning. Share some of these ideas with your manager or use some of them on your staff.

One of a hospital’s top priorities should be to retain competent nurses within its facility. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, hospitals will need more than 1.2 million replacement RNs by 2014. Maintaining an enjoyable, positive working environment is essential to nurse retention, and educators can take steps to ensure that their nurses are happy to be hired into—and stay at—their organization.

“It’s more important than ever that when we bring candidates through the door, we have to start thinking about retention as a recruitment tool,” said Lydia Ostermeier, MSN, RN, CHCR, director of nurse recruitment, retention, and work force development at Clarian Health in Indianapolis, during HCPro’s recent audioconference “Retention in Nursing: Top Solutions to Keep Nurses from Hire to Retire.” “We must aggressively recruit and retain our top talent,” said Ostermeier.

Some of the reasons nurses are leaving include:

• Unsatisfactory relationship with management and coworkers
• Poor work-life balance
• Dissatisfaction with scheduling process
• Unfair distribution of workload
• Lack of clear communication

“Let’s try to turn the tide on this turnover,” said Shelley Cohen, RN, BS, CEN, an educator and consultant at Health Resources Unlimited in Hohenwald, TN, and cospeaker with Ostermeier during the audioconference. “You want staff to walk away believing you really are going to do something.”

Practical steps for keeping staff members

Taking steps toward retention can save your facility in more ways than one. According to a study published in Nursing Economic$, “Replacement costs include human resources expenses for advertising and interviewing, increased use of traveling nurses, overtime, temporary replacement costs for per diem nurses, lost productivity, and terminal payouts.”

Thus, the first step for hospitals is to make staff members feel important. “It’s all about making people feel important and vital in the department they’re in,” said Cohen. “Are they playing a key role in the positive outcomes of the patient? If you look at reasons why a lot of staff don’t hang around at the clinical nurse level, they’ll tell you they didn’t feel valuable.”

One strategy to make nurses feel vital to your facility is to incorporate staff member surveys on a regular basis. “Say, ‘Tell me two things about this organization that you think are so positive and that encourages you to come back to work here week after week.’ Those pieces of information are going to give you a perspective on how people feel important to an organization,” said Cohen. Be sure to ask pertinent questions and share results with all staff members.

Personalizing your reward efforts, added Cohen, is also a useful way to help nurses feel valued.
Some other key retention strategies include:

• Retention committees. “They do work and they can work,” said Cohen.
• Bragging rights. “We do not do enough as organizations to brag about all the accomplishments that our nursing staff are able to complete, whether it’s meeting patient safety goals or a group of OR nurses that have just received their surgical certification,” said Cohen.
• Focus groups. “Find out what retention efforts are most important to them,” said Ostermeier.

Editor’s note: For more information on topics like these, check out The Staff Educator