NRS 451 Benchmark – Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management

NRS 451 Benchmark – Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management

High turnover rates in nursing remain one of the most critical determinants of a healthcare organization. The rate and frequency that nurses or hospital workers join and leave affect the provision of healthcare directly or indirectly. The nursing profession is unique and demands practical as well as strategic leadership and management skills and approaches that will ensure new hires and experienced nurses are retained in a healthcare facility or organization (Wood, 2017). Imperatively, to tackle this issue, nursing leaders and managers need to interrogate the causes of high turnover and contributing situations. The high turnover rate of nurses emanates from a host of factors that require leaders in the profession as well as institutional managers to seek effective methods to minimize their occurrences. These include career advancement, retirement, increased workload, lack of life and work balance, rescheduling, and low nurse staffing ratios, among other issues (Hughe, 2017). Imperatively, this paper focuses on how leaders can deal with the issue of turnover and address it through an appropriate leadership style.

Nurse Turnover

An increasing recognition exists that the attainment of a health system’s objectives, including sustenance of efficient delivery of quality patient outcomes, requires an adequate and effective nurse workforce (Carlson, 2018). As such, organizations should have effective retention of their nursing staff and ensure that they possess the right skills within the sustainable workforce. Different studies and reports demonstrate the extent and the effects of a high nurse turnover that affects almost the entire global healthcare industry and nursing sector (Hughe, 2017). Nurse attrition results in different and high costs to healthcare organizations.

In their article, Ellrich and Nelson (2020) observe that the industry registered the highest levels of nurse turnover in 2019, and the most affected nurses are mainly those with less than two-year period in an organization. The authors note that the industry registered about 17% in turnover rates and costing every hospital about $4.4 million each year. The authors are pessimistic that with the current problem of COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals will continue to register increased workforce instability than ever before. According to Wood (2017), high turnover rates are costly to the healthcare system and harm the quality outcomes for patient care. Carlson (2018) asserts that nurse attrition has enormous impacts on both organizations and employees, especially nurses in units like emergency departments and rooms. The adverse effects include reducing overall morale, chaos in the scheduling process, loss of resources, and a stretched human resource capacity as well as overwhelming the human resource teams and their ability to have effective recruitment. Carlson notes that the staffing process is the worst hit by attrition, and it becomes harder for nurses to perform their duties usefully due to increased burden and long shifts.

As such, overworking the nursing staff that is retained may be the prudent move in the short term for nurse managers. However, it increases the nurse-patient ratios, which can lead to burnout, possible medication errors, and even more turnover. The replacement of a nurse costs a health institution between $22,000 and $65,000. Further, reports show that a hospital can lose close to $8 million each year indirect costs related to nursing turnover (Wood, 2017; Ellrich & Nelson, 2020). The implication is that high nurse turnover can result in a loss of essential memories by affected nurses about an institution. Imperatively, leaders and nurse managers need to get strategic solutions through better leadership approaches and management interventions to address this critical problem.