Necessity is the mother of invention.
It’s a truism because, well, it’s true. You don’t find a new way to do something unless you have a problem that needs to be fixed.
Is that what UPMC is doing with its latest announcement? This isn’t a new hospital or a new treatment or a new specialty. It’s a new venture that could change how the hospital system deals with increases in patients and deficits of staffing.
On Friday, the state’s largest health system, with facilities that cross borders into New York and Maryland, announced it was creating its own in-house traveling nurse program. Tami Minnier, UPMC’s chief quality officer and senior vice president of health services, said she believes it to be the first of its kind.
The idea is to be able to preserve staff in the face of the challenges of competition. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed preexisting weaknesses in the health care field, not the least of which was an already thin crop of nurses.
As hospitals and nursing homes experienced high demands, nurses maintained existing wages. Many have left for the much-greener paychecks of nursing agencies, which can mean a staff nurse works side by side with a traveling nurse making twice as much.
UPMC’s plan is to keep its nurses and recruit others by offering the benefits of both an agency and a single system.
It just might work, and it’s the kind of opportunity that wouldn’t be an option at an independent hospital or even a small system. The scope of UPMC might be what makes it feasible.
But what could make it fall apart could be those same issues that have made nurses leave for agencies in the first place. It isn’t just about the money. It’s about respect and appreciation.
That’s the aspect of the nursing shortage many seem to miss. No one ever got into nursing because it was lucrative. They did it because it’s a calling, but that’s no excuse for not treating nurses like the foundation of the health care industry that they are.
Money is a fine way to show that. So is a work-life balance. So is being treated like a valued member of a team.
UPMC’s plan may recognize that, and if so, this is the kind of outside-the-box thinking that might solve an industry-wide problem.
— The Tribune-Review (TNS)
