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All we can say about AONE 2016 is ‘WOW’! The energy and excitement that emanated from nurse leaders during the conference refueled our motivation to advance healthcare innovation. This year, we spoke with hundreds of nurse leaders about their current rounding processes and initiatives. Thanks to these conversations, we’ve been able to identify key challenges nurse leaders consistently face within their organizations.
Nurse Attraction and Retention
It’s a problem that’s plaguing facilities coast to coast. Nurse leaders from all over the nation are faced with the challenge of retaining their frontline nurses. Not only are frontline nurses the largest resource pool to care for patients, but they’re represented in every acute-care department from IT to administration. Attracting and retaining talented care providers is a high priority across the healthcare continuum.
Driving HCAHPS Improvements
Though many organizations have made incremental improvements over the past few years on several HCAHPS composites, organizations are still finding it challenging to maintain the improvements once their goals have been met. We’ve found that organizations who have introduced a digital leader rounding process are either able to resolve patient issues or alert other departments of issues instantly, closing the communication gap and ensuring the patient walks away with a satisfied hospital experience.
Instilling Purposeful Rounding Processes
When talking with nurse leaders about their rounding process, they shared their challenges when attempting to cultivate processes that are consistently done in a purposeful manner. Nurse leaders affirmed that consistency is crucial to effective hourly and leader rounding, but the quality of the round is key. Instilling a culture of purpose-driven intentional rounding remains a top priority, and there are countless opportunities to use new technologies to aid the purpose-driven processes.
Beyond conversing with nurse leaders, we were fortunate to give away unique t-shirts this year. Nurse leaders vivaciously strutted around while displaying their ‘Keep Calm, I’m a Nurse’ shirts. The shirts were so popular that at times we had long queues of nurses waiting to get their hands on this keepsake!
We have our eyes set to Baltimore’s AONE 2017, but now we’re off to The Beryl Institute's’ Patient Experience Conference in Dallas before trekking off for NICHE 2016 in Chicago.
