Healthcare facilities depend on nurses to provide a considerable portion of patient care. From phlebotomy to medication administration to doctor assistance, nurses do it all and are integral to any healthcare organization. Because of this, every facility needs a steady lineup of accountable nursing staff. This article will examine accountability and why it’s so crucial in nurse staffing.
What is Accountability in Nursing?
Providing high-quality patient care requires reliable nurses who are accountable to facilities and their patients. Facilities need nurses who arrive at their shifts on time, do not cancel shifts at the last minute, act with integrity, and always put the patients' well-being first. Accountable nurses also do all they can to ensure good patient outcomes, including working collaboratively with their team, advocating for patients, and owning up to mistakes when they’re made.
Accountable facilities address work-related issues and complaints promptly and attentively. They also take responsibility for their mistakes and rectify them.
Accountability from both sides is necessary for quality care provision.
Inadequate Nurse Accountability Weighs on Facilities
While many nurses live up to the qualities of accountability, some do not. And when one or more nurses cancel their shift minutes before it’s scheduled to start, it puts the facility in a precarious situation where they need to urgently fill the staffing gap another way. This may require the facility’s administrative staff to scramble to find replacement nurses. It may also cost the facility an astronomical amount of money to find and contract with a qualified nurse on short notice.
Lack of Nurse Accountability Forces Other Nurses to Overcompensate
Nursing is known to be a high-stress profession. But it gets much harder when nurses call off or don’t pull their weight during their shifts. When this happens, other nurses have to pick up the slack, so that patient care doesn’t suffer. This leaves the other nurses overloaded. Additionally, it can have a negative domino effect that impacts other nurses, patients, and the facility's bottom line (especially if preventable errors occur).
Finding a Nurse Staffing Agency with Accountable Nurses is Difficult
Why is it hard to find nurse staffing agencies that prioritize accountability? It’s anyone’s guess. But one thing that’s no mystery is that many nurse staffing agencies have no accountability measures in place for their nurses. Because of this, their nurses have such a great deal of flexibility that they can ditch shifts and make serious mistakes without consequences.
Luckily, not all staffing agencies are negligent in this area. Some have processes and procedures in place to promote accountability and minimize costly lapses in agreements and integrity. We encourage you to choose a staffing agency that enforces attendance policies and uses its resources to train nurses on how to provide white-glove service to patients. Without such measures in place, you leave the quality of your temporary staff to chance. And in an industry like healthcare, this can be costly in more ways than one.
How Nurse Staffing Agencies Promote Accountability in Nurses
Here are a few ways that nurse staffing agencies promote accountability among their nurses:
- Motivate nurses to communicate freely to keep processes on track and signal when things aren’t proceeding as planned.
- Require nurses to stay abreast of the latest patient privacy regulations to safeguard patients’ HIPAA rights.
- Set limits on when shifts can be canceled and sanctions for exceeding these limits.
- Foster patient advocacy to ensure favorable outcomes.
- Implement ongoing education on accountability-related topics. Nurses should know when they are accountable during the provision of care. Knowledge of transfer of accountability is critical because once one nurse leaves at the end of their shift and hands a patient off to the next nurse, the latest nurse becomes responsible for that patient’s health-related wants and needs.
- Set goals related to nurse performance, including metrics like patient health outcomes, facility feedback, and more.
Teaching your facility’s care philosophy and general best practices to temporary nurse staff may be necessary. However, you can save time and money by hiring nurses that have been appropriately trained on accountability.
We encourage you to work with a nurse staffing agency that keeps nurse accountability at the forefront. Your facility and patients will surely notice the difference.
