The Keys to Combating Staffing Challenges? Timely Communication & Data Access

If you ask directors of nursing what issues are keeping them up at night, there’s a good chance that staffing challenges will be high—if not first—on their list of concerns.

Staff turnover in healthcare is rising due to burnout, retirement, or the desire for a career change.

Recent data estimates more than 200,000 registered nurses are needed to replace those retiring or leaving the workforce, while the estimated shortage of physicians is projected to range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.

Unfortunately, the deficit is only expected to increase in the coming months.

So, how do we combat this crisis?

By leveraging available technology to improve the day-to-day lives of clinicians and give them more time to do what they love: Caring for patients.

Use Technology to Improve Day-to-Day Operations

Now is the time to embrace technology that streamlines clinician workflows and connects care at the source.

Staff are the backbone of any healthcare organization and it’s critical that they get the support they deserve to achieve desired outcomes.

PointClickCare’s Automated Care Messaging is a platform that increases patient data visibility and facilitates timely communication, two of the key ways technology improves caregiver workflows and combats staffing challenges.

With improved patient data access, clinicians spend less time searching for information and have seamless access to the most critical patient data when and where they need it.

With one point of entry that populates directly to the patient’s medical record, the possibility of missing or incorrect data is eliminated and caregiver efficiency is significantly increased.

Additionally, timely communication enables nurses to have a connection to the resident around the clock. Automated, real-time notifications deliver routine communication to stakeholders, saving time and enhancing collaboration across the care team. With timely, transparent communication, staff engagement and satisfaction increases dramatically.

Bigger Impact, Less Work

Chandra Wilson, Health Information Consultant at Heritage Pointe of Fort Wayne, recently shared that her facility went from spending two hours trying to manage communications every day to dedicating just two minutes daily to complete the same amount of work.

“Now, our staff can help the nurses with other administrative tasks, enabling them to spend more time with residents,” she said.  

Automated communication also proved to be vital during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When we entered lockdown, Automated Care Messaging gave us a way to provide daily updates about COVID-19 quickly and reliably to our residents’ family members and other contacts. The pandemic has been a stark reminder of why we need a streamlined approach to managing our communication.”

With Automated Care Messaging, the staff at Heritage Pointe in Fort Wayne have created a more efficient process and built stronger relationships among care teams.

More Time with Patients = Less Burnout

Time-consuming, paper-based tasks, like documentation, devour staff’s valuable time that should be spent with patients.

Streamlined access to data and automated communication not only improves outcomes for an organization, but also improves the day-to-day lives of frontline caregivers by helping to reduce burnout and give them more time to focus on what matters most: Caring for residents.