Nurse engagement and retention
UX Design - Service Design - UI Design - Development
The Project
IU Health is the largest healthcare provider in the state of Indiana with over 40,000 employees. When the annual employee engagement survey results showed that the nurses were lagging the rest of the organization in engagement, I was tasked with gaining an understanding of why engagement was so low, as well as helping discover ways to improve first year turnover. This turnover became our primary KPI.
Research
After planning and conducting user interviews(alongside organizational development consultants) with nurses of various tenures, as well as from each of the hospitals, we combined our information into a spreadsheet. Using that data along with feedback through exit interviews, we organized everything through affinity mapping.
The main findings were:
- Lack of a sense of belonging caused by too little face time with leadership.
- Lack of career ambition caused by a perceived lack of upward mobility in nursing.
Solutions
In collaboration with nursing leadership as well as IT staff, we decided that a website dedicated to nursing would help communicate the different opportunities nurses have to further their careers. We also created a mentorship program to help increase the facetime primarily for first year nurses. Through the help of IT, we set up automated emails to help managers schedule meetings with their nurses at regular intervals starting with a new hires start date. I wanted to be very respectful of everyone's time, as they were already extremely busy. Working with nurse educators for content, I created user flows to streamline the process of utilizing the resources on the new website.
Outcomes & Recommendations
Using the previous 3 years of data, we were able to see a reduction in first year turnover for two consecutive years of just over 3%. Based on the estimated cost of hiring nurses on average, this resulted in an annual savings of over $11M.
Another recommendation I made after looking through nursing data and finding that the rate of incidents is higher in the last 4 hours of a nurses 12 hour shift is that they explore transitioning to 8 hour shifts. They set up a committee to explore this after I moved on from this role so I'm not sure what the status is on this.