According to a new study The 2007 Hospital Check-Up Report: Nurse and Employee Perspectives on American Health Care, registered nurses are the least satisfied hospital employees.  As the president and chief executive officer of the company producing the report said: Maintaining and attracting world-class talent is increasingly important in the face of ongoing staffing shortages.  Hospitals that focus on the needs of their employees find staff members are able to more fully engage in their roles and better focus on providing high quality care.  Improving the quality of care and making a difference is the reason most professionals enter the health care field.”

The study goes on further to say that nurse satisfaction is tied to the nurse vacancy rate of a hospital.  THIS IS NEWS??

This is no surprise to the clients that I work with and the thousands of people that hear me speak every year.  In fact, I recently gave a speech in Anaheim to the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration.  Consider the following from my company’s last national benchmark of workforce engagement conducted in 2006:

• 39% of healthcare workers are Fully Engaged, while 37% are Unengaged.  This is a significant downward trend from 2004.  Just as many healthcare workers are pulling for their organization as pushing against it.
• Less than 2 out of three healthcare workers enjoy coming to work (63%)
• One in four healthcare employees does not have a positive relationship with their boss (25%)
• Slightly more than half of all healthcare employees agree their organization treats employees well (55%)

In fact, out of the 100 some-odd questions that we ask in our survey of workforce engagement, health services workers rated their employees more negatively in 90% of them, ranging from Daily Satisfaction (the most important aspect of engagement among healthcare workers) to Tools and Technology, to Ethics, Diversity, and Safety.

Here’s some more food for thought.  During the second quarter of 2007, the average separations in healthcare were 389,000 workers per month, nearly 13,000 per day, 9 every minute.  Worse yet, 2/3 of these separations are employees that quit their job, and ultimately the patients they serve.

And if you think that satisfaction among nurses only impacts their retention, read on:

•  According to a JAMA abstract, each additional patient per nurse was associated with a 7% increase in the likelihood of dying within 30 days of admission, and a 7% increase in the odds of failure-to-rescue
•  In hospitals with high patient-to-nurse ratios, surgical patients experience higher risk-adjusted 30 day mortality and failure-to-rescue rate

It seems that turnover is the most positive impact of nurse dissatisfaction.  Obviously healthcare employers don’t know what to prescribe to improve their levels of employee satisfaction.  And in this case, pharmacology isn’t the answer.