Using big data to address nurse staffing
Staffing has long been one of the Achilles heels of the nursing profession, confounding nurse managers and nurse leaders alike, and taking up an inordinate amount of time. Our guest for this episode is an expert on the topic and has taken her cues from other industries to treat this as a data science problem.
Early in her career, Therese Fitzpatrick was a chief nursing officer for various hospitals and health systems in the midwest before taking a turn as an entrepreneur, receiving her PhD in sociology and becoming a professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. Today she is an executive at consulting firm Kaufman Hall, where she helps hospitals across the country assess their clinical and operational performance, and optimize their staffing.
In this episode Therese walks us through how she applies big data to the problems of staffing and workforce optimization, some low-tech ways that nurse managers can approach scheduling, and how COVID-19 will impact the evolution of the nursing workforce. Therese believes that robust float pools driven by Millenial and Gen Z nurses are the future and encourages nurse leaders to include them in conversations around staffing and workforce.
Links to recommended reading:
- Improving Quality of Nursing Worklife: A Global Perspective Using Labor Optimization for Nurse Staffing
- The Art and Science of Nurse Staffing (AACN)
- Effective Staffing Takes a Village: Creating the Staffing Ecosystem
- Advanced Analytics Must Drive the Next Round of Productivity Initiatives
- https://www.kaufmanhall.com/
The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/therese-fitzpatrick
