CRH endures nursing shortage

By FULLER ROYAL

Columbus Regional Healthcare is feeling the crunch as its rolling turnover rate of nurses hits 25 percent or an average of 2 percent each month.

CRH Chief Executive Officer Bill Clark said that that number is considered high.

“Normally we had been running under 20 percent – 16 or 17 percent,” Clark said. “We’d like to see it below 10. That would be a good benchmark.”

Clark said that the hospital’s interim director of nursing, Ann Carter, is aiming to turn things around.

Clark said that Carter is a “very experienced” independent contractor with years spent working at hospitals throughout the country. She replaced Jimmy Williams, who retired earlier this year.

“It is a nationwide problem,” Carter said. “I have had the advantage of traveling around the country. The nursing shortage is especially heavy in the Northeast and West. The shortages I have seen here are not on the dramatic scale I have seen in other places.”

Clark said that most of CRH’s nurses come from Columbus County.

“We get a few from outlying counties,” he said. “Occasionally someone will move here.”

Most earned their nursing degrees from Southeastern Community College.

“This year, we hired 10 new nurses from the graduating class,” Clark said, adding that CRH faced a lot of competition for those nurses from other sources and nurses have many more options available to them.

Nearby hospitals compete and it’s not unusual for nurses in the southern portion of the county to drive to geographically closer hospitals in Loris or North Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Nurses in the eastern end of the county may choose New Hanover Regional Medical Center while those in the northwestern portion of the county may opt to work at Southeastern Regional Hospital in Lumberton.

The past 15 to 20 years have seen the rise of home health firms, both private and public. The increased number of physicians offices have lured more nurses into private practice.

“There’s a lot of competition,” Clark said. “One of the issues – and it’s always an issue – is the seven-day-a-week, 24 hours-a-day job with nights and weekends. Sometimes scheduling is an issue.”

Carter said that CRH is implementing a lot of new strategies to recruit and retain its nurses.

Among those is working closely with new nurses, especially during their first six months at CRH as they transition from students to real nurses.

“We have a very active recruitment and retention committee here,” Carter said. “We’re listening to that committee to tell us what we can do to improve and how to make them stay. They have had really good suggestions.

Among those suggestions is better attention paid to scheduling and more flexible hours for staff.

CRH is also looking at using recruiting bonuses to any employee who finds a nurse for the hospital to employ.

Carter said that the hospital is considering offering additional money to nurses for signing on and for remaining after a certain period of time, perhaps six months.

“There are a lot of great things that we have going on here,” she said. “This is really a progressive hospital.”

A big selling point, Carter said, is the new medication verification process.

Nurses administering medication must first scan the barcodes on the patient’s chart, the barcode on the patient’s wristband and the drug containers.

All three must match before the medications can be given to the patient.

Carter said that nurses are attracted to the process and it greatly reduces the stress of managing multiple medications for multiple patients on any given shift.

“The reason that’s such a big recruitment tool is nurses want to work where the medication system is very safe,” she said. “We are very fortunate to have that here.”

Carter is contacting all of the SCC nursing graduates who choose to work somewhere other than CRH and find out what the hospital can do in the future to entice them to work at CRH.

Recruiting brochures will also be distributed to nurses in adjacent counties. Carter said a focus group at CRH is staying in touch with the new SCC grads.

“We are really listening to our staff,” she said. “This is not a top-down management operation. We are listening to employees and letting them tell us what they need to – ways to retain staff.”

And, she said, the relationship between the local doctors and nurses is good.

Carter said that nurses would come to realize that CRH is a good place to work.

She said that a person called her Wednesday morning asking about the possibility of a nursing job for his fiancé, who was tired of the big city hospital scene with its intense schedule and workload and wanted a more reasonable pace.

“We hope to get her, a very experienced nurse,” Carter said. “People move here – maybe they don’t need that 800-bed center and want a more family oriented style of hospital. We want more nurses to know all about the good things we have here.”

Clark said that nursing is hard work. “It’s very demanding but very rewarding.”