Toward that end, health organizations are implementing workforce strategies that help nurses have work-life balance and improve their job satisfaction. One such strategy is Collaborative Staffing.

Empower nurses with a Collaborative Staffing approach

The old way of staffing was a top-down approach. Nurses were assigned shifts by their manager. But staff know their preferences and availability better than managers. By giving them control over the shifts they pick up, they enjoy better work-life balance and an increased sense of autonomy.

Collaborative Staffing is a staff-partnered process that empowers employees by giving them visibility into organizational needs and enables them to be part of the workforce solution. It’s a joint effort between managers and staff to fill open shifts in a way that meets patient care needs and takes employee skills and preferences into account.

A best-practice methodology that gives nurses a voice in the process, Collaborative Staffing helps nurses feel empowered and trusted to make important decisions. And engaged, happy employees perform better, which in turn yields better patient outcomes.

Collaborative Staffing also makes managers happier because they can spend less time on scheduling and more time with patients—which is what they got into the caregiving profession to do.

And because Collaborative Staffing provides interdepartmental visibility and communication, nurses can fill available shifts that they’re qualified to work outside their home unit. Everyone reaps the benefits of this approach with system-wide staff optimization, decreased overtime and premium labor costs, and increased employee engagement.

Learn how you can take advantage of Collaborative Staffing with Centricity^TM ShiftSelect^®.

Together, Microsoft and GE Healthcare are dedicated to making sure the voices of nurses are being heard and that our digitally transformative eHealth solutions address their needs. So please let us know if you have any feedback or questions via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

And please also let us know if you’re interested in blogging for the nurses’ blog. It’s a place for nurses to be inspired and collaborate with other nurses—a platform to amplify nurses’ voices and their influence on health IT.

The post Empower nurses to have work-life balance—Part 2 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Many of the frontline nurses and health leaders we speak with every day are concerned about nurses’ heavy workloads. If nurses are overworked or unhappy in their jobs, it can lead to burnout and exhaustion that affects not only their wellbeing and job satisfaction, but patient care.

Taking care of those taking care of patients has become such a vital issue in healthcare that the Triple Aim has evolved to the Quadruple Aim—the fourth aim being to address clinician and staff satisfaction. It’s increasingly being recognized that happy, healthy staff is crucial to achieving the other three aims—improving patient experience, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita cost of care.

Professional nursing organizations are taking a stand on the issue and have identified effective staffing as one of the key strategies for improving nurses’ work-life balance and wellness. For example, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses offers six healthy work environment standards that include appropriate staffing as well as true collaboration and effective decision-making.

As health organizations digitally transform, they’re finding that today’s technologies can help them align with such standards in innovative and efficient ways. For example, cloud-based workforce solutions make it possible for nurses to go online and choose their shifts so they’re a part of the staffing process and can create their own schedule to have the work-life balance they need. Visibility and analytics across a health enterprise can help balance staffing needs with nurses’ availability and preferences. And algorithms can help match nurses skills with patient needs for acuity-based staffing, which improves job satisfaction.

In our next blog, we’ll share more about how a best practice workforce strategy can facilitate staffing that leaves nurses feeling empowered, energized, and happy in their work. So stay tuned for that blog at the end of this week on the nurses’ blog.

It will take a village to transform healthcare and achieve the Quadruple Aim. That’s why Microsoft and GE Healthcare work together every day on eHealth solutions that can help foster a healthy working environment for caregivers. Nurses Week happens once a year, but the compassion and dedication nurses bring to their patients never stops—neither does our commitment to nurses.

Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post Empower nurses to have work-life balance—Part 1 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.