Introduction
The quality of services delivered in a healthcare facility is determined by its nurses’ competence and capability to learn new skills to deliver better services. Technology is a critical effective staff training to enable the facility to maintain its unique quality service delivery. Thus, the nurses are the ultimate strength that maintains the patients’ positive perception due to a collection of unique services delivered. Therefore, effective policies should guide nurses’ recruitment and retention in healthcare facilities. Such policies should always ensure that the facility recruits the best candidates with credible skills and can learn new skills that they would persistently apply to unique service delivery. Patients and their family satisfaction with the services offered is the ultimate determinant of whether the facility would compete with the surrounding healthcare service providers in the long term. This assessment analyses, examines, and evaluates healthcare issues facing recruitment and retention of nurses and presents detailed policies that hospital management should enact to alleviate such issues.
Literature Review
Recruitment and retention of nurses is a critical consideration that healthcare management should consider. The quality of services delivered by nurses is determined by their skills and readiness to respond to different emerging issues triggered by external and internal factors (Halcomb et al., 2018). However, the recruitment process in most healthcare facilities is faced with a high level of incompetence by the recruitment manager and human resource manager. Such failure has resulted in the selection of unfit employees resulting in high turnover. Candidates’ experience in handling specific duties in the health sector has been overemphasized in the recruitment and selection process. This tendency has led to the selection of candidates who are not ready and willing to learn new skills, thus downgrading their innovative capabilities (Afolabi et al., 2018)). Employing experienced nurses is effective, but recruiting skilled, innovative, adaptive, and ready-to-learn nurses would enable the healthcare facility to maintain its high standards of quality service delivery to patients. Therefore, the normal issues of biasness and incompetence recruitment and selection process exercised by some recruitment managers and human resources have devastating effects on medical facilities.
Furthermore, recruitment processes that do not select the most competent candidates will result in low employee retention rates. Selection of experienced nurses who are not willing to learn new skills would result in a disruptive working environment since some of them ignore to follow simple instructions given by their departmental heads (Cosgrave, 2020). Therefore since there is a poor collaboration among nurses and a lack of workplace respect due to their egos of some them, there would be a failure to attain the set targets within the stipulated time. Such an unconducive working environment would trigger some of the nurses to resign, seek employment from the surrounding health facilities, and share strengths of the medical facility where they were initially working (Attenborough et al., 2019). Hence, there would be stiff competition among healthcare facilities, and the ones with incompetent recruitment managers would be overwhelmed since they would be incurring more expense and time in recruiting new nurses.
Impact of Recruitment and Retention Issue
Loss of revenue
Healthcare facilities with ineffective recruitment and selection processes incur huge losses since most of the annual salaries of various positions are used to replace nurses. Some of such costs involve expenses involved in off-site training and job posting fees (Hall et al., 2018). Recruitment of nurses who are incapable of satisfying emerging patients’ needs and are unwilling to learn new skills to improve service delivery would trigger the management to replace such an incompetent workforce (Abelsen et al., 2020). Thus, failure to embrace effective recruitment would make the healthcare facility face stiff competition from the surrounding medical facilities with competent nurses since their expertise in improving their skills would enable them to meet the patients’ needs effectively.
High turnover
Healthcare facilities that have hired incompetent nurses for various positions would have to repeat the entire process and refill the new vacancy immediately. Such a process would waste energy, time, money, and other recurrent training and recruitment expenses (Abelsen et al., 2020). Vacancies in healthcare facilities adversely affect attaining its set targets of delivering the best medical services to the patients since the quality of services diminishes and the existing nurses are frustrated due to the huge workload. Moreover, high turnover would lead to repeated training of the core workplace values, which sometimes frustrates the nurses working in the facility.
Lack of managerial confidence
Good and competent nurses may lose their trust in the healthcare management team after they realize that decisions involved in the hiring process have been poor for a long time. Also, hiring managers may lose their confidence in their service delivery capability. Managerial competence is determined by their resilience in administering proper recruitment and selection processes and offering the best training to motivate the recruit to maximize their expertise and remain loyal to the healthcare facility (Efendi et al., 2019). Thus, a lack of managerial confidence may affect the entire healthcare system since leadership may not be in a position to provide the best guidance to nurses, resulting in poor service delivery.
Lack of workplace morale
Healthcare organizations with ineffective recruitment and retention capabilities would adversely affect the productivity and teamwork of good and competent nurses. Such effect would less likely occur in top-level management nurses but affect operational-level nurses who are in direct conduct with patients since they feel underappreciated, overworked, and frustrated (Parkinson et al., 2019). Moreover, the poor hiring process has frequently instigated a negative workplace attitude since the incompetent nurses lack the zeal to improve healthcare service quality by positively responding to patients’ complaints and concerns (Sunarti et al., 2021). Finally, since poor recruitment and selection processes adversely affect workplace morale, good and competent nurses could leave the healthcare facility, thus resulting in greater turnover issues.
Solutions to Curb Recruitment and Retention Issue
Stop outsourcing recruiters
The hospital should stop outsourcing its recruiters to different healthcare facilities to undertake the recruitment and selection process since such practices may have adverse long-term effects. The strength of any organization gives it the capability to survive in a competitive environment. Thus, healthcare facilities are not exceptional, and their management should introduce unique mechanisms to protect themselves from avoidable competition (Hall et al., 2018). Outsourcing recruiters may give the competitors room to offer financial benefits to the recruiting board in exchange for competent and experienced nurses. The competitors would offer better salaries to the vulnerable but competent nurses, thus making them resign from their duties to work for the competitors. Total elimination of such cases could be achieved once the hospitals stop outsourcing their recruiters and offer fair payment of wages and salaries to their nurses.
Hiring for potential but not experience
Healthcare systems are faced with a variety of emerging issues, and effective mechanisms of handling such challenges could be attained once the recruitment managers and human resources majors focus on candidates’ potential but not on strictness experience adherence. Experience is a credible determinant of good healthcare service delivery. However, the nurses’ potential to learn new skills to deal with various emerging issues would result in delivering remarkable services to patients in the long run (Horowitz et al., 2019). Thus, most of the positions that are not too critical in hospitals could be handled better by nurses with the necessary skills and willingness to learn compared to experienced ones who are unwilling to learn new skills.
Studying the results
Recruitment managers and human resources should study the quality of services delivered by the entire workforce and offer necessary guidance to the nurses whenever they are consulted. Medical practitioners would improve their skills in handling and tackling various emerging issues in the healthcare sector once they are given the necessary professional guidance and time to perfect their skills (Lander et al., 2019). The managerial teamwork aspect in guiding the nurses is critical in improving their expertise and enabling them to feel valued by the hospital. Therefore, successful recruitment and retention can be attained once the management is result oriented and applies rational measures to minimize workplace problems and ensure that there is a conducive working environment for the nurses.
Keeping an eye on the competitors
Payment of good salaries and wages is an aspiration of all the nurses in the healthcare sector. The hospital management should therefore focus on providing reasonably competitive salaries and wages for its nurses to enable them to meet their needs effectively, thus shunning the desire to work for other healthcare facilities that may promise them good wages (Cosgrave, 2020). Staying ahead of the competitors by initiating better policies before them is the ultimate competitive tactic that hospital management should embrace.
Ask nurses questions
Hospital managers and leaders should always interact with the nurses in a friendly manner and enquire whether they are facing any workplace challenges that require managerial intervention. Such an approach will allow healthcare providers to share various workplace impediments if a participatory leadership strategy is applied in the healthcare facility (Halcomb et al., 2018). The collaborative and coordinative working relationship between the leadership and nurses would make the employees feel appreciated by the hospital, thus remaining loyal and leading to a high retention rate.
Hospital-Level Polices
Code of Ethics
Adopting policy of code of ethics helps healthcare facilities in determining the type of behavior, principles, and ethics that the management may want the nurses to demonstrate in various circumstances. Code of ethics ensures effective consideration of workplace cultural respect, fairness, accountability, respect, honesty, and adherence to the healthcare aims and targets (Chhatre et al., 2018). Such policy is critical in ensuring that there is a conducive working environment to enable nurses to perform their duties effectively.
Administrative and human resource
Human resource and administrative policies cover the entire aspects of running a healthcare organization, from business entity to the perspective of its personnel. The major role of a healthcare facility is provision of quality medical services to patients. Still, being a business, these policies ensure that available resources are effectively utilized, thus improving the profit (Afolabi et al., 2018). Furthermore, provision of quality services is attained once there is fair working hours for nurse and shift changes, thus enabling them to remain alert and attentive in handling the patients.
State Policy
Setting up fair minimum wages for nurses.
State policy of setting fair wages and salaries for nurses by the different governments has helped in dealing with recruitment and retention issues. Good salaries and allowances have triggered nurses to learn new skills to improve their capability of delivering effective services to patients.
Critical Analysis of the Solutions
Stoppage of outsourcing recruiters
Hospital management would be free from losing its experienced healthcare nurses due to unprofessional agreements between the competitors and some recruiters. After improving the retention rate, the management should focus on eradicating workplace challenges and offering good salaries and allowances for its nurses (Jongen et al., 2019). Some of the funds saved after handling recruitment and retention issues are used to offer good salaries and creating a conducive working environment, thus maximizing the nurses’ potential quality healthcare service delivery.
Hiring on potential but no experience
The healthcare facility would benefit by having an innovative, skilled, ready-to-learn workforce capable of handling emerging healthcare issues. The nurses would be result-oriented and apply their utmost potential in delivering remarkable services to the patients, thus increasing hospital returns in the long run (Brook et al., 2019). The hospital utilizes some of its profits in purchasing modern machines and opening up more branches to increase its competitive levels in providing quality healthcare services.
Competing favorably
Providing competitive salaries, allowances, and wages would enable healthcare facilities to maintain their competitive workforce, thus improving their expertise and skills. Hospital facilities would therefore invest some of the money lost in persistent recruitment processes in improving the high quality of emergency services, thus reaping high benefits and staying ahead of their competitors (Ford-Giboe et al., 2018). Creating a positive patient perception of the healthcare facility would increase the number of patients visiting the facility, thus maximizing its profits.
Studying the results
The managerial tendency of providing effective professional guidance after being consulted by the nurses would increase their skills, thus meeting patients’ expectations. Such employees would respond to patients’ complaints and concerns very fast hence enabling the facility to meet its ultimate goal of saving lives efficiently and effectively (Chhatre et al., 2018)). Improving nurse expertise through periodic training would enable the healthcare facility to maintain its dominance in providing quality health services.
Solving nurses’ workplace issues through interrogating them
The interactive nature between the management and the nurses would result in a collaborative working environment hence improving the workplace morale. A motivated workforce would major focus on delivering remarkable services to patients and assuring them to improve the quality of such services (Liu et al., 2018). A cohesive working environment of the entire workforce would result in fluency in successfully delivering sophisticated medical services like surgeries effectively since there is high coordination of all players in the healthcare facility.
Code of ethics policy
Conducive working environment whereby nurses and entire healthcare employees are handling their duties fairly, honestly, and respecting others results in attainment of set organizational set targets effectively. Attainment of a collaborative and coordinative working environment is determined by this policy.
Human resource and administrative policies
Productivity in a healthcare facility is attained once effective guidance is given to nurses and ensuring that resources are sparingly utilized. Nurses would handle their duties effectively once given fair workload, and there are proper shifts to minimize workplace-related stress and depression.
Evaluation of Outcome of Intervention
Saving the organizational revenue
Effective recruitment and retention policies would enable a firm to save most of its expenditure incurred in recruiting new nurses. The management could utilize such capital in handling various healthcare targets that may improve the competitiveness of such facilities (Asghari et al., 2019). Such activities may involve;
- Improvement of the emergency services by purchasing more ambulances.
- Opening up of new branches, thus dominance in providing quality healthcare services in large areas, thus acquiring higher returns from their operation.
- Modern medical machines’ purchasing leads to the effective delivery of sophisticated services like major surgeries.
Boosting the workplace morale
Good recruitment and retention allow healthcare facilities to maintain competent nurses who can utilize their skills effectively and collaborate, thus boosting the working morale. Nurses’ coordinative and collaborative aspects would help in performing their duties independently without frequently consulting the management (Attenborough et al., 2019). The outcome of effective workplace morale involves;
- Meeting the organizational set targets within the stipulated time.
- Fast response to patients’ complaints and concerns, thus meeting their expectations efficiently and effectively.
- Minimal workplace conflicts due to cohesive working relationships that is result oriented.
Minimizes nurse turnover
The healthcare facility would lower the nurse turnover rate after initiating effective recruitment and retention since the best candidates are selected for various positions. A high retention rate is attained after the management emphasizes creating a conducive working environment and offering the best training and guidance programs to enable the nurses to improve the quality of services delivered (Huot et al., 2019). Factors that help in alleviating employee turnover include;
- Fair payment of wages, salaries, and allowances.
- Motivating competent nurses through rewarding them.
- The collaborative and coordinative working relationship between the management and the nurses provides necessary guidance.
Improves the managerial confidence
Achievement of effective recruitment and retention policy would improve the managerial confidence in handling their assigned duties uniquely and professionally. Recruiting the best candidates and maintaining them within the healthcare facilities would trigger a managerial sense of achievement since the facility would reap high benefits from the competence of such nurses (Cosgrave et al., 2019). Some of the merits of improved managerial confidence include;
- Provision of effective and professional guidance to nurses.
- Active involvement in solving workplace conflicts.
- Managers are team players in ensuring that the nurses apply their skills effectively, thus ensuring quality service delivery in the healthcare sector.
Other Possible Solutions to Recruitment and Retention Issues
Remote selection of candidates
Select candidates remotely by analyzing their innovative and analytical skills through various recruitment tests. Such a strategy would curb corruption cases that trigger the selection of incompetent nurses, thus improving the effectiveness of the recruitment process (Malatzky et al., 2020). The recruitment manager and human resources should guide the selected candidates in offering basic training to enable them to perform their duties effectively.
Fair workload
Assigning a fair workload would enable nurses to perform their duties in a particular medical facility for a long time. A fair workload accompanied by flexible shifts allows the nurses to have recreational time with family and friends, thus improving their productivity (Afolabi et al., 2018)). Healthcare management should create a conducive working environment to motivate their staff to handle their duties effectively.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the success of a healthcare facility is determined by its nurses’ competitiveness and their persistency in developing critical skills that improve their resilience in dealing with emerging healthcare issues. Healthcare organizations should initiate effective measures in handling problems relating to recruitment and retention. Low nurse turnover would help the facility in its delivery of quality treatment services to the patients since the workers’ expertise is improved. Finally, solving the issues relating to recruitment and retention would enable healthcare facilities to compete with the surrounding medical service providers favorably.
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