Dear Nurse Beth,
We are an excellent skilled nursing facility, but are having difficulty recruiting LPNs and RNs. We can not compete with acute care on wages. Do you have any advice on how we can compete with acute and clinic nurses?
Thank you.
Dear how to get nurses to work in your excellent SNF,
That's a great question because it is a dilemma. But you can do it!
For many nurses, it's an employer's market when it comes to new grads. Hospitals in many areas can afford to be choosy and turn away applicants. The fall back position for the nurses is then sub-acute nursing.
In your area, it sounds like the other way around. You are competing with acute care and clinic facilities for the same nurses. Are you targeting new grads or experienced nurses? You would have better luck with new grads who would appreciate a job and the experience with procedures and nursing skills that you offer.
You have to be creative, and willing to spend some money upfront in order to save money and improve patient care in the long run. You must be able to look past this month's budget and to try different long-term strategies. This is where many acute care facilities fail. Often the finance people are short sighted and end up costing the facility hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruitment and retention over the years, not to mention the indirect costs of low morale (errors, patient satisfaction, poor attendance). This is something every nurse who has ever worked in a hospital knows.
Focus on your employees. Do they know how much you value them, and are they treated with respect? Is poor performance not allowed and is evidence- based practice supported? Top performers want their managers to deal with coworkers who perform below the bar. Employers who permit low performers to continue to perform poorly lose their top performers because the high performers have to pick up the slack and perceive their low performing coworkers to be rewarded while they are punished.
Reputation and Recruiting
Explore non-monetary ways to compete. How can you make your great facility a desired place to work? You know it is excellent, but you want the community and nurses to know as well. Make it a goal to become known as the premier skilled nursing facility in your area. Have you won any awards? Been featured in local magazines? Call the editors and have them do a feature article.
What are you currently doing for recruitment? Do you have a booth at career fairs, speak at local colleges with nursing programs?
What can you offer nurses that would be a perk?
Self-scheduling? The hospitals in your area may already be doing self-scheduling, but if not, it would be a great recruiting tool.
How about the Baylor plan? Is there any way you could offer a Baylor Plan of staffing? Baylor is where nurses either work weekdays or weekends, but not both.
The nurses who work weekdays are paid regular pay, but never have to work weekends.The nurses who work weekends only are paid an adjusted hourly wage that amounts to the same salary as a full-time nurse.
The payoff for the facility is tremendous. The facility saves money within a short time because it reduces your turnover immediately. Retention improves because it is hard to walk away from a job where you work your dream hours (whether weekends only as full-time, or every weekend off). You will have nurses lining up at your door,, especially to work the weekend positions, trust me. You could then even hire them into a weekday position to get on the weekend list.
Seniority and Self-Governance
Another perk is to reward seniority. If a nurse stays with you for x amount of time (say, one year), you provide him or her with four hours of a housekeeping service twice a month. It's non-taxable for the nurse, but a tax deduction for you. You can increase the reward as seniority increases.
Implement a unit-based council based on a self-governance model. This empowers nurses to make nursing practice changes, and engages employees.
Another strategy to consider is to identify an experienced and influential nurse in the community who is talented but perhaps has not yet been promoted. Target this nurse, and start recruiting him/her for a leadership position. This person has nursing connections that can benefit you. One or two friends may even join them in their new job.
I hope some of these ideas helped, or got your creative juices flowing. Keep us posted!
Best,
Nurse Beth
