Strategic Value Analysis In Healthcare
|
Strategic Value Analysis In Healthcare |
|
|
|
|
STRATEGIC VALUE ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER |
|
Home Weekly Strategic Value Analysis Newsletter ValueNet Central TM Value Analysis Software
|
 |
SPANNING THREE DECADES OF VALUE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP December 20, 2001
NURSING SHORTAGE CALLS FOR NEW “ECONOMIC” STAFFING AND SCHEDULE MODEL!
A recent survey of 6,000 nurses by the Pennsylvania Nursing Association showed that 66% of the nurses surveyed would have taken another career path other than nursing if they were starting over today. And 32% said that they would be leaving nursing within the next 5 years.
I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to you that the nursing shortage in the U.S. is stressing all of the nation’s hospitals finances and quality of care. Unfortunately, with many nurses reaching retirement age or leaving the profession and nursing schools not being able to fill their quotas the nursing crisis will only get worse over the next few years. What is the answer to this challenge? Streamline and reinvent how your nurses are scheduled and deployed.
Change the Rules and You’ll Change Your Outcome! Historically, it has been the conventional wisdom that if you want to have the lowest nursing cost, you staff your nursing units based on their average daily census, measure productivity by HPPD and implement a Patient Focused Care model to lower RN ratios. This nurse staffing and scheduling model worked well for healthcare organizations in the 90s, but it is now counterproductive in the rapidly changing healthcare marketplace. Healthcare researchers, over the last few years, have recognized that an economic model is a much better approach to staffing and scheduling nurses in the 21st century than the census driven model of the 90s. This economic model increases nursing ratios without adding the burden of higher cost. The added benefits of an economic model are:
· Increased care hours · Improved quality of care · Improved nursing satisfaction · Reduced nursing overstaffing and understaffing · Reduced nursing overtime, agency and on-call hours
These benefits can be achieved because the economic model disfavors the assumption that “one-size fits all” as it relates to nursing staffing and scheduling. Whereas, the economical model customizes your nurse staffing at the 95th percentile of your census and right sizes your schedules for all of your nursing units, thereby, scientifically smoothing out your census variation and optimizing your nurses’ productivity.
New Economic Care Model Methodology This new care model becomes a reality through a series of activity and cost analysis to determine the optimum economic staffing levels for your hospital. The goal being to fill your beds to a predefined optimum levels in the appropriate sequences to allow more nurses to be brought to the bedside at no additional cost, thus, virtually eliminating overtime, agency and on-call hours. Although this new care model is somewhat time consuming to develop, this up front analysis is critical to its success, since it is carefully build around your patient acuity and care needs at optimum census levels and labor cost. Lastly, training is required for your nursing administrators, nurse managers and staffing coordinators on how to determine and manage patient placement according to a set of predetermined guidelines designed for this new care model.
Why a Change is Needed Now in Nurse Scheduling and Staffing Time is running out when even minimum nursing staffing will be possible at our nation’s hospitals. Therefore, new nursing care models need to be developed now to head off this impending disaster. I believe that the “economic” care model is a start in the right direction, because it can allow our nation’s hospitals to once again gain control over their nurse staffing, increase care hours, reduce nursing cost and provide our patients with the best medical care that they deserve and expect in the 21st century. Copyright © 2002 The HCP Group, Ltd. Robert T. Yokl, President, The HCP Group, Ltd., has over 35 years of experience as a consultant and manager in the field of Supply/Value Chain Management and is one of the country's leading healthcare experts in value analysis, value engineering and materials management. He is the developer and program leader of the award winning Certified Value Analysis Practitioner Training Program™. Mr. Yokl is also the developer of the healthcare industry's leading ValueNetCentral™ Value Analysis Software. Over the past two decades he has trained thousands of healthcare managers in his patented Strategic Value Analysis™ and Team-Based Project Management™ processes and has assisted scores of organizations in developing their own value management programs. He has published six books, videos and audios on supply/value chain management. His latest book being, “ Strategic Value Analysis™: The #1 Smart Strategy for Taking Cost Out of a Healthcare Organizations’ Supply/Value Chain”.
|
|
 |
|
|
|