Currently, the highest-demand clinical areas in the acute care setting are Intensive Care, Emergency, Labor and Delivery, and the OR/Procedural departments. ReSkilling is designed to help facilities find and train qualified clinicians to provide that specialized care.
Even though there’s a massive nurse shortage, every year most graduate nurses can’t find jobs in acute care. A hospital might have fifty to one hundred openings in acute care but only take twenty graduates due to a lack of proper post graduate training for the positions. Many nurses who graduate don’t get their first or second or even third choice hospitals - there can be three hundred applicants for 15 positions in certain residency programs due to lack of post graduate training slots.
It’s for these reasons that newly-licensed nurses often don’t go into acute care but instead find employment in long-term care, ambulatory clinics, and behavioral health. This large (and growing) pool of registered nurses with two plus years of experience make perfect candidates to be reskilled for positions in acute care.
This pool is inclusive of far more than just early-career nurses. There are many nurses with ten plus years of experience who have indicated they would like to ReSkill. An internal survey with 18,835 respondents on the SnapNurse platform found an incredible 18,776 (nearly 99.6%!) replied YES to ReSkilling in a different specialty. If healthcare facilities polled their own nurses, our internal polling data suggests a large percentage of full time staff would also raise their hand for ReSkilling.
A lack of training and career development is a reason often cited by nurses who leave a facility. In the current post-pandemic environment many hospital education departments have been decimated with staff departures and no longer have the staff or resources to train nurses into new specialties.
So how can ReSkilling play a role in augmenting the pool of specialty nurses?
First, identify registered nurses who are interested in acute care and move them to a hospital enrolled in a qualified ReSkilling program. The application process must be rigorous and only the most highly-qualified nurses, with two years experience or more should be selected for ReSkilling.
This program is designed to source and place permanent positions in hospitals. It works best when candidates are identified and sourced within the primary service area of a hospital. Those candidates need to match the core competencies and skills necessary to succeed and stay in that particular hospital.
Once placed at the designated hospital a nurse is scheduled to receive 13 weeks of intensive specialty-specific training supporting the hospital in the specialty they have selected. ReSkilling is designed as a partnership whereby experienced nurse preceptors provide training and a clinical manager works seamlessly with the hospital to ensure the program meets predetermined success metrics.
There is a significant commitment from the nurses who participate in the program. ReSkilling incentivises retention with the goal of a successful transition into a full time internal position upon program completion. Tech platforms like SnapNurse form the basis for the program and are best positioned for success on all sides by identifying nurses with the right credentials who have self-selected to ReSkill and upload their pre-matched credentials. Candidate vetting is done online with synchronous interviews and online modules facilitate specialty-specific virtual education.
ReSkilling is not primarily designed to ReSkill a hospital’s existing staff but rather to source new clinicians on behalf of the facility and expand the nurse specialty skilled workforce. This is an innovative and collaborative temp to perm solution that decreases hospital sourcing and recruitment costs and aligns platform strengths with hospital weaknesses. It is intentionally designed to empower hospitals with the choice to determine if a clinician is a strong fit before they transition into a permanent role.
ReSkilling is the right solution at the right time in this post pandemic environment. It is well positioned to deliver enormous benefit to any hospital that needs to augment its nurse specialty workforce and will lead to improved patient outcomes, patient safety and nurse:patient staff ratios.
About SnapNurse: SnapNurse is America’s emerging leader in healthcare staffing. #2 overall on the Inc5000 and importantly #1 in Healthcare. Helping facilities across the country by placing thousands of nurses and allied professionals on-demand in as little as 24 hours. Select from certified RNs, LPNs, EMTs, CNAs, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and more.