The Recruitment and Retention Team at Floyd Medical Center in Rome was formed in 2002 to reduce the hospital's nursing vacancy rate.
Faced with a 12 percent nursing vacancy rate and sky-high agency nursing bills in 2002, Floyd Medical Center in Rome decided to attack the problems head-on with a team of people who knew the issues - the nurses.
In three years, the initiatives proposed by the hospital's Recruitment and Retention Team not only turned the situation around, but garnered awards from the Voluntary Hospital Association and The Georgia Partnership for Health and Accountability.
"Located in a small city near the Georgia-Alabama border we're somewhat limited in our employee pool," said Diane Davis, RN, BSN, MBA, vice president of nursing at Floyd Medical Center. "Although we have a nursing school in town (Floyd College) and those students do their clinical rotations here, we weren't doing a good job of attracting those students after graduation."
With a vision to be an employer and provider of choice, administrators put together a Recruitment and Retention Team with members from every nursing unit. Their mission was to identify opportunities to retain high-quality employees and recruit qualified staff to fill vacancies.
"We chose all ages for the team, from nurses nearing retirement to brand-new recruits," Davis said, "and one of the key pieces to our success was creating Wonderful Wednesdays. By sharing patient loads, we were able to take team members off-site for a half-day of activities and lunch once a month. They were able to fully participate without the distraction of a patient load."
Early meetings were an eyeopener as the nurses discovered that different generations had different viewpoints. Older nurses were concerned about health insurance and retirement benefits. For baby boomers putting children through college, salary was a high priority. Young nurses with small children were interested in flexible scheduling. "Just being able to recognize and talk about these differences helped them learn to work together better," Davis said.
The team researched the national nursing shortage and pinpointed the reasons for Floyd Medical Center's high vacancy rates. All agreed that they could do a better job in welcoming clinical students and making them feel like a part of the health care team instead of a student nurse. They planned social events and meet-and-greet conferences.
Management developed a six-month internship period for new hires. New nurses work with mentors and receive additional training before being assigned a full patient load.
"It's a chance for them to learn procedures or equipment that they may have missed in school and to gain extra experience," Davis said. "As mentors, we chose staff with key talents for organization, communication and critical thinking.
"Some of our new nurses said they didn't need it, but when we did evaluations at the end of the internship period, 100 percent said that the experience was valuable and that they had a better understanding of the big picture."
The medical center attracted 20 nurses from the most recent graduating class at Floyd College.
To increase retention, the hospital raised the bar on employee selection. Preemployment testing helps ensure that new hires are a good fit. The human resources department hired a professional recruiter to streamline the interviewing and hiring process, adjusted nursing salaries, reduced the insurance waiting period from 90 to 60 days and initiated a pilot program for selfscheduling in the emergency and critical care units.
"The team endorsed and we implemented an employee referral program that pays bonuses to employees who recommend new professional and technical staff that are hired. We've found a number of good people that way at much less cost than agency nurses," Davis said.
Statistics confirm that the changes are making a difference. A survey by HR Solutions found that Floyd Medical scored third in the nation in employee satisfaction. Surveys also show an increase in patient satisfaction, a decrease in medication errors and improvement in outcomes. The LPN/RN vacancy rate is down to 2 percent to 3 percent and agency costs have gone from $1,773,688 in fiscal 2004 to a projected $276,293 in 2005.
"It's exciting when you see your programs working, but we're not about to rest," Davis said.
The hospital has expanded the team to Recruitment, Retention and Research. "They're looking into the image of nursing, patient opinion on white uniforms, and how to further improve our student-nurse relationships," she said.
"We want to apply to be a magnet hospital."