What could go wrong? You’re confident in the plan you’ve set in place and have carefully considered every element. You know the hours of nursing care you’ll need to provide from your pool, developed the right compensation structure, and launched a strong recruitment, selection and on-boarding program. Nothing could go wrong. Right?
Not so fast! Speaking as someone with a high penchant for preplanning, I’ve got to admit, A LOT can and often does go wrong in the execution and ongoing operation of high-impact nurse staffing pools. Why? Perhaps you’ll find as many have that your plan has purposefully embedded, but not fully considered the impact of, two fiercely conflicting elements.
To make the business case and appeal to the nursing leaders your pool will serve, you’ve embedded two elements not typically known to easily coexist:
- Low administrative and management infrastructure costs.
- An employee population of strong-minded, independent-thinking healthcare professionals with a go-anywhere attitude and aptitude.
Most would agree that nurturing relationships with a strong employee population requires more, not less infrastructure. We’re proud to say the Avantas plan for high-impact nurse staffing pools successfully embeds both elements. Why does it work in our model?
Thorough preplanning sets the infrastructure in place. Diligent early stage leadership efforts hardwire it.
Here are examples of key elements:
Know who your customer is:
- Unabashedly focus on the patient and the nursing departments that serve them. Remember you’ve promised them your pool members are the Best of the Best.
- Make your pool’s patient commitment the center of your employer communication from recruitment through the life of the employment relationship.
- Use this simple truth – we are here to care for patients – to turn all employees back to the purpose for a high-impact nursing pool and the responsibilities membership in that pool entails.
Say what you mean and mean what you say:
- Clearly express expectations. Immediately point to any occurrences of behavior outside the acceptable norm.
- Have an extremely abbreviated professional improvement planning process. Give each individual one opportunity to completely correct unacceptable performance.
- Do not be afraid to reduce the numbers in your nurse staffing pool to those who are capable of exhibiting Best of the Best behaviors. Failing to do so will increase your leadership costs and negatively impact customer behaviors.
Aggressively seek frequent feedback from your customer departments:
- Make nursing pool members a part of the feedback process.
- Create an easy method to seek and receive performance updates.
- Openly share and consistently respond to incidents – both positive and negative.
- Visit departments frequently.
These commonsense tips are just a part of what you’ll learn if you chose to be guided through the nurse staffing pool model provided through Avantas healthcare consulting.
We have helped a number of clients build out effective pools, enterprise and site-based. Managing a group of highly-skilled, strong-minded care givers is not rocket science, but there are a few essential ingredients and formulas to consider to ensure your pools blast off and fly like they should.