Strategic Imperatives For Nurturing A Future Ready & Global Nursing Workforce

The pandemic exacerbated the pre-existing challenges in healthcare and demanded swift actions to stitch gaps and align efforts to meet future demands. The rapid transformations and ever-evolving needs in healthcare have necessitated keeping a skilled, future-ready nursing staff available to avert a demand-supply imbalance. While the nursing staff  at this juncture is evaluating what the workplace might look like in the near future, the healthcare sector has to manage two of its utmost priorities— the operational challenges, and investing in innovative organisation and talent models to address the needs of patients and employees.  

Patient-centricity and better accessibility with digitalisation

The healthcare industry that has been historically slow to change, successfully demonstrated how it can accelerate transformation to meet the demands of a future that is going to be intuitive, dynamic and digital. This has resulted in a recalibration of efforts from volume to values and in becoming patient centric by prioritising outcomes that matter to the patients. Here, digitalisation has emerged as an enabler to amplify medical services and make it more accessible and available. Moreover, with digitalisation, it has become possible to improve access to care for patients, care delivery services for better patient care and management.  

Equipping the skills of the future

Today, the ever-evolving needs of the healthcare industry demands equipping staff with new skills to meet the current and future on-job demands. New age technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and others are continuously being used across the healthcare industry on a high scale for various applications.  The emergence of new tasks will require constant and continuous upskilling and training of the staff. Going forward, the requirements will have to be fulfilled by regular on-job training to stay relevant and serve the patient efficiently. Also, it might be a little difficult to fill the gaps with fresh hiring easily, and the institutions will have to supplement external hiring with internal development initiatives and regular on-job training. 

Efficient resource allocation and management

The hospitals or other care institutions follow the traditional midnight census to measure patient demand. While the approach may have some benefits, it overlooks some granular aspects or trends which can be measured in hours or minutes. For them, the efficient allocation of the right nursing staff to the right department is perennially frustrating.  The attached challenges involve exceeding the staffing budget and disturbing the nurse-to-patient ratio. The traditional approach to estimate overall inpatient hospital census to make administrative decisions rely solely on limited data points and may not accurately reflect the actual requirements of the hospitals.    

Furthermore, lack of accurate and timely data pushes hospitals towards overstaffing, resulting in overheads. On the other hand, this also results in under-staffing and jeopardise clinical quality and patient satisfaction. The way forward can be better data management and workforce optimisation modelling to review staffing and budgeting. With information on data points ranging from hourly patient demand to clinical time entry to bed capacity to nurse-to-patient ratios, the hospitals can work on their inefficiencies and operations with modifications in work rules or scheduling protocols. 

Gerald Jaideep

Guest Author The author is a CEO, Medvarsity