Tag: burnout

A Not-So-Silent Battle: Tackling Nurse Burnout with Innovative Solutions

Brandy Sparkman-Beierle
Brandy Sparkman-Beierle

By Brandy Sparkman-Beierle, chief clinical officer, Homecare Homebase.

Healthcare is a fast-paced and demanding industry that has undergone profound challenges over the past few years, and its frontline employees are taking the brunt of the impact. Burnout among nurses is not new, but the pandemic significantly exacerbated it. While the world begins to see the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, America’s nurses are still trying to catch their breath.

The intersection of rising patient volumes and staffing challenges has led to a significant drop in nursing satisfaction rates. This overextension puts healthcare professionals at risk of burnout, impacting their physical and mental well-being. A 2023 AMN Healthcare survey discovered that the satisfaction level among registered nurses has plummeted to 71%, reflecting the strain on care teams. The consequences of nurse burnout are far-reaching, affecting the individuals directly involved and the quality of care delivered to patients. To combat this growing epidemic, many hospital systems are left with the decision to deploy comprehensive technology solutions to fill the gaps and take some of the burden off the patient care teams’ shoulders.

The Need for Innovation

Addressing nurse burnout requires a proactive approach, and innovative solutions can be pivotal in transforming the landscape of patient care, whether in-patient or home-based. Organizations must prioritize the well-being of their nursing staff and seek tools that provide actionable insights into care team satisfaction. It is crucial to investigate solutions that assess the current state of nursing satisfaction and offer strategies to enhance their professional experience. Some tools that provide these essential benefits include:

Mobile Communication for Patient Care: As clinical outcomes become increasingly tied to revenue, home health, and hospice care require intricate documentation during every visit. Overlooking even a minor detail can significantly impact the level of care provided to your patients and expose an organization’s systems to noncompliance risks. Utilizing a mobile collaboration tool, nurses receive user-friendly prompts, reminders, and notifications and can efficiently record documentation during each visit, avoiding needing to catch up later. These systems also empower users to personalize assessment forms and pathways, reducing duplicate entries and ensuring agency and state compliance.

Education and Training: Boosting retention efforts by developing programs that train, provide ongoing education, and touch base with nurses throughout their first year and beyond is crucial to enhancing the nurse experience and reducing burnout. Leveraging an end-to-end collaboration solution ensures agencies and healthcare systems have the tools and knowledge to run successful training programs. Some ways to bring these programs to life include:

The Role of Clinician Scorecards

One of the most essential things a platform can do for its users is make it a priority to listen to caregivers and act on those insights consistently. This is where tools like clinician scorecards become paramount. These tools work as a comprehensive means to evaluate and improve the well-being of nurses and field clinicians by going beyond traditional metrics and delving into the intricacies of nursing satisfaction levels.

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Continued Value of Observation in the Modern Age of Medicine

The technology available to diagnose and treat a wide variety of illnesses and ailments continues to improve with every year. While these developments are undoubtedly contributing to increased rates of recovery and preferred patient outcomes, doctors and other medical professionals continue to rely on a relatively basic set of guiding principles when determining the probable causes of disease and the best methods of treatment.

Simply put, physicians learn to pay attention to their patients and watch closely for the signs and symptoms of various illnesses and ailments. More times than not, a trained doctor can make an accurate diagnosis based on physical examination and conversation.

With this in mind, regular folks can easily improve their ability to monitor loved ones for signs of illness by simply improving their observational skills. While we do not advocate for armchair diagnosis — the opinion of a licensed physician is always recommended — the ability to pay attention to the right clues can go a long way in making sure you and those around you are not turning a blind eye to something serious.

For instance, if you’re married to someone who suffered from alcohol or drug dependence in the past, there may be numerous telltale indications of relapse. According to a leading center for drug rehab in Georgia, addicts often retreat from the people in their lives. They often start making excuses for things and neglecting their responsibilities. They often become alienated from their relatives and from society in general. If your husband or wife behaves oddly any time he or she consumes alcohol, then that may denote an issue with alcohol addiction. Addiction to alcohol is a problem that plagues people all around the globe. It plagues people young and old as well. Pinpointing common signs of addiction can do a lot for people who want to help their loved ones nip serious issues in the bud.

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