Nursing

Identifying personnel factors behind your staffing trends

Nurse Leader Weekly, May 24, 2004

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Weekly!

How do individual people, groups, and interpersonal communication skills create staffing trends? Although analysis generally concentrates on system or process flaws, you cannot ignore the influence of human behaviors on trends. Consider the following questions as you analyze your staffing data and identify trends and their causes.

Individual instigators:
* Are certain persons continually late, calling in sick, or leaving early?
* Are some staff members continually unreliable because of frequent family emergencies?
* Do you notice that staff absenteeism creates a pattern?
* Do absences follow weekends or other days off?
* Do they occur on particular shifts?
* Do they occur on some units more than others?
* Are instances of staff absenteeism more frequent when certain groups of staff members are scheduled to work together?
* Are some staff members perceived as difficult or unreliable to work with?

Management style:
* Are some units chronically understaffed?
* Are certain managers perceived to be ineffective?
* Are certain managers too harsh or too lenient?
* How do other departments and physicians perceive these units?
* Is there agreement among managers concerning staffing patterns?
 
Staff training:
* Has the staff received proper education and training to take care of patients?
* Are they comfortable with their knowledge base?
* Do they feel they need additional education and training?
* Do these feelings influence staff absenteeism?

New staff:
* Are there certain units that have a reputation for treating new staff members poorly, making it difficult for them to assimilate into the unit?
* What is the patient satisfaction level on these units?
* How do other departments view these units?
* What are the patient outcomes on these units?

The preceding questions are not all-inclusive. Interpersonal, or personnel factors, can influence the effectiveness of staffing in a multitude of ways. As you look for trends in the data collected, be on the alert for a correlation between behaviors/attitudes and staffing effectiveness. Your analyses may identify the need for disciplinary action or further education and training.

Source: Staffing Analyzer: Simplifying Data for Nurse Managers, published by HCPro, Inc.



Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Weekly!

Most Popular

Related Articles