Addressing Talent Rollover Challenges in Per Diem Nurse Staffing
We have journeyed from a time of shortages in the nursing profession to an influx of nursing professionals facing a highly competitive market where the right opportunity is not always readily identifiable. Facility closures, financial burdens and constraints, healthcare reform, and a lack of opportunity to gain experience have all limited the opportunity available to nurses in today’s climate.
So why then do per diem agencies still experience high rates of attrition and rollover when nurses often face employment insecurity?
Agencies Must Do More!
Agencies must do more and put at the forefront practices to develop employee relationships with its field staff who accept one and done assignments. Nurses at various facilities, schools, home care, and other settings often find employee loyalty a challenge as well as overcoming the feeling of being a warm body strewn about. This in turn leads to discontentment and rollover.
Breed a Sense of Camaraderie
Per diem nursing professionals rarely get to feel a sense of professional camaraderie as they tend to move about too frequently to establish roots. This can be rectified by having internal staff members and nursing supervisors perform field visits to work sites and cultivate a team-building experience with field clinicians.
Orientations
Gone are the days of agents dispatching nurses to an assignment hoping that the perfect match has been realized. Having proper comprehensive orientations that give nurses the proper tools to succeed in the field independently could serve to let these brave professionals feel less alone as they continue to visit new sites with unprecedented regularity as opposed to many of us that work day in and day out at the same locale.
Meeting each per diem staff member’s professional needs with hands on demonstrations of medical equipment used in specific settings or assignments will go a long way in instilling a sense of caring about professional growth with the addition of new or enhanced skills.
Keeping in Touch
Keeping in close contact with field staff using current technologies to share information and fostering communication between nursing professional and work sites will serve to create a sense of loyalty for the nurse and the agent. Ensuring that each per diem resource has a specific contact at a work site will generate a sense of belonging and familiarity that would otherwise be lost upon arrival.
These are some of the many ways Horizon Healthcare Staffing has strived to reduce rollover, foster longevity and further professional development and retention. This is what separates us from all the other nurse staffing agencies.
