For years, nurse staffing has been one of healthcare’s biggest challenges. SnapNurse, a company that aims to connect the dots between facilities and the clinicians best qualified to meet their staffing needs, is setting out to help resolve the problem.
HealthCare Business News spoke to Jeff Richards, company cofounder and chief development and operations officer, to discuss the situation and how his company is poised to improve it.
HCB News:: Nurse staffing has been a hot topic for years now, especially since COVID. Where do things stand today? Jeff Richards: As someone who has worked in healthcare for 25 years, the consensus I’m hearing is that this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it.
A nurse staffing shortage has been predicted for years, but not at the scale and to the degree that we are seeing it today. All the research prior to COVID’s arrival in 2020 was pointing towards a nursing shortage that would accelerate at the end of the decade (2018-2019). This research focused on the dual demographic trends of decreasing numbers of nurses in the workforce (due to Baby Boomer retirees) and an increasing number of patients (same aging population requiring more healthcare). Compounding those demographic trends is a decade-long (or longer) underinvestment in nursing schools and nursing faculty.
HCB News: And then COVID hit. JR: COVID in many ways was the perfect storm that exacerbated all of those existing trends. The growing problem of episodic understaffing suddenly transformed overnight into chronic and severe understaffing. Acute and post-acute facilities were overwhelmed by waves of COVID patients throughout the pandemic. Staff-to-patient ratios quickly exceeded anything we've ever seen outside of war zones, and crisis staffing provisions that were intended to be short-term became the new normal. After enduring almost two years in crisis mode, many nurses burned out, retired early, or quit bedside care altogether. All of this has led to a post-pandemic staffing crisis which has only further reduced an already shrinking nurse workforce. This new crisis in nurse staffing could persist for up to a decade unless we collectively find new ways to address the underlying problem holistically.
HCB News: Can you talk about the staffing crisis from the point of view of hospitals and health systems? JR: Reports showed last year’s RN turnover to be about 30 percent on average, but we’ve spoken with some hospitals and post-acute facilities that are battling with closer to 100% turnover in certain specialties like emergency medicine. With turnover rates that high, staffing has become their administrators’ all-consuming priority. Before quality improvement initiatives, before starting up a new service line, before any strategic activity at all, they must ensure safe and appropriate staff-to-patient ratios.
