Strengthening Your Nursing Pipeline Through Personal Development

Organizational leaders and nurse educators are concerned with the adequate training of nursing students. Being able to adequately support their skill development and clinical practice is key. The support to new nurses is also key to adhering to nursing standards and maintaining patient safety. A shortage of nurse preceptors, along with a higher number of travel nurses, has impacted the nursing profession, thus requiring a solid strategy to strengthen the nursing pipeline.

The shift in the trends across the profession of nursing suggest a rapid movement and strategy in the area of retention. The sky is clear and the beautiful river flows freely and gives life to a new nursing landscape. But this new landscape is rife with struggle from a previous nursing shortage.

Today, post-COVID, requires us to place a high level of energy and dedication to supporting health and wellness practices of nurses – to retain them. But expect some hiccups along the way since most health and wellness programs, particularly those that fall under EAP, lack employee engagement. These are the same programs that bleed health care budgets, and they also lack progress and enthusiasm. Of course, we’re sure to expect a period of resistance; more so with health executives who are likely getting pitched constantly with low-quality, budget-bleeding programs. After all, their primary interest is keeping the budgets balanced in a health care system that seems to be imploding the budgets on a good day.

It’s been suggested that approximately 80% of employees who work at companies with robust health and wellness programs feel engaged and cared for by their employers. That’s because job satisfaction means the world to employees. When it comes to personal development and wellness in the workplace, according to Nursing Central, nurses find this particularly appealing. Might this leads us into a new era of strengthening our nursing retention strategy?

The key is, we have to move forward to reach healthcare’s goals: retain as many qualified nurses as possible so the hospital achieves its mission. Let’s pause for a moment.

Can we do better?

To make the most of the current pipeline, particularly with new hires and new grads, it’s imperative to meet them where they’re at. It’s all too common to pull-back budgets and cut areas that are most important to our retention strategies. In an era where the demands of their work increasingly burden healthcare professionals, the need for innovative solutions to support their well-being has never been more critic.

Healthcare systems worldwide are grappling with a growing crisis: the retention of skilled health practitioners. Burnout, stress, and a lack of adequate support drive many professionals to leave the field, exacerbating a critical shortage of healthcare workers. The impact of this crisis extends beyond the individuals directly affected; it jeopardizes the quality of care patients receive and strains the entire healthcare infrastructure.The goal of The ProMind Experience is to engage practitioners on a regular basis, so they take action consistently throughout our 7 weeks together, effecting positive behaviour change over time. These are the Mindful Clinicians who will produce results for you. They will stick with you in the long-run because they feel valued and appreciated.

Personal Development & Satori’s 5-Step System For Peak Performance

The peak performance of our health practitioners is not just a professional concern—it is a societal one. When we fail to support those who care for us, we undermine the very foundation of our healthcare system. Our mission is to create better human outcomes for health practitioners. Once you determine that the health and personal development is key to your retention strategy, and focus on that singular goal, the opportunity to make a positive impact will follow, and the need is urgent. When you have a mentally-focused and healthy workforce, they have greater performance. The body and brain are working in a cohesive manner.

Process + Mindset Are Required

Many workplaces have health & wellness committees, created by the employees themselves, which is a great start. They all want to help, and have their hearts in the right place. However, all too often, these committees lack both the process and mindset to creating sustainable change across an entire organization. In fact, both process and mindset are typically missing across most employee wellness programs. This is because they focus on a few laser strategies, in fear of overwhelming staff. What results is a duct-tape approach to giving a ton of strategies without process or mindset and the health program doesn’t serve the whole person.

Why People Burnout

Since COVID-19 there’s been a significant shift in not just how or when nurses work, but how much they work. Many nurses ended-up working longer hours, with less downtime in between. This additional work has left health practitioners at a higher risk of burnout and stress, with some nurses still on leaves. Self-regulation becomes more difficult during times of stress. Burnout is a physiological condition that occurs when the body’s pushed to its limits. It simply secretes too much cortisol than the mind/body can handle.

Here are the 3 leading reasons for people burning-out:

Too big of a workload.
Their family and personal lives are challenged due to job.
The employment doesn’t allow them enough time outside of work to recover (see episode 38 on what to do on your day off work).

Armed with such information, healthy workplaces could reduce these risk factors to fosters healthy employees and further strengthen the nursing pipeline. Wellbeing programs are a workplace staple, offering a strategic way for employers to encourage healthy lifestyle choices and invest in their employees’ physical and mental wellbeing, preventing the cycle of burnout from occurring. Included in The ProMind Experience, is our 3-part training series The Banish Burnout Bootcamp to support staff at balancing

Strengthening Your Pipeline Through Health Promotion Programs At Work

The field of health promotion/disease prevention heavily relies on the science of behaviour change. People don’t change that easily, and their daily behaviours are deeply entrenched in values, beliefs, and old subconscious programming. Healthy behaviour change in the workplace requires strategic assessments, workplace health redesign and a sustainable health strategy. If you want to develop a Health Promotion Program at work, and help your employees build healthy and sustainable habits, know it takes more than a little dedication, it takes a supportive environment.Hospitals today require a shift in focus to support the entire wellbeing of their staff.

A Consciousness Shift To Strengthen Your Nursing Pipeline

I invite you to take an honest look at your own values regarding health, wellness, peak performance and your mindset on staff retention. And then extend that view to the culture of your management, and then the organization at large. Most importantly, you should have a general health & wellness perspective when it comes to workplace health promotion programs to not waste funds or personal time.

By improving workplace health programs in hospitals, employees can rebound from the challenging physical responses leading them to burnout. When we launched ProMind some years ago, our vision was simple: Get health practitioners to think about their physical and mental health more proactively. In early 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched it to the workplace as an experiential, pro-active, hospital-wide initiative, The ProMind Experience. We wanted to support hospitals in raising awareness of burnout, along with the benefits of workplace well-being and personal development.

The ProMind Experience broadened its focus to encompass physical, cognitive, spiritual and behavioural health to help hospital employers understand and support the full range of wellbeing needs of their employees. Of course, the term “Wellbeing” is quite expansive, but engaging the frontline in an experiential program was the place to start. We feel the most important element of being well is to be able to self-regulate, and balance your health across all areas in your life – and become more aware of what makes you feel un-well/un-balanced. Awareness and mindfulness are just the beginning of The ProMind Experience. We then take health practitioners 4 steps beyond that, in our 5-Step System For Peak Performance.

Will You Be That Clinical Leader To Shift To Innovative Solutions?

When you partner with Satori, you instantly create value for the hospital and its nursing teams. Founder & CEO, Lynn Chénier, has directly faced the challenges of burnout as a nurse on the frontline. She became so frustrated with frontline nursing that she was moving-on to become a Doctor of Chiropractic. Alongside Chiropractic, Lynn pursed her nursing career part-time and then abruptly faced a life-altering motor vehicle crash on the highway. This catastrophic event forced her to pause her career for nearly a decade to recover from the challenging orthopaedic traumas. This didn’t stop her from pursuing her goals and dreams, however. Her peak performance attitude, and background as a nurse and chiropractic student supported her recovery through this car crash.

Lynn not only speaks as a nurse, but carries with her a 25+ year practice in Transcendental Meditation. She teaches students to meditate with a mantra, to recover from the daily stress and allow the mind to reach expanded states. Her team of health professionals work alongside stakeholders and the frontline to support, engage and motivate every step of the way.

Summary

Personal growth and development go hand-in-hand with strengthening the future nursing pipeline. There are so many self-care activities that have the ability to promote health and wellbeing, but evidence suggests that staff don’t implement these strategies. Many short programs are merely dosing nurses with a ton of strategies, but missing a system to implement. Satori gives them both, a process + mindset, its 5-Step System For Peak Performance. Health professions in particular need both to create the necessary shifts in maintaining health and balance in their lives. When nurses have a process for creating more balance in their lives, they have a more positive impact on patient care.

When health institutions purchase run a hospital-wide program like The ProMind Experience, all health care staff experience change and growth at the same time. This is a proactive approach, unlike any other program out there.

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@satorihealth.ca or check-out The ProMind Experience demo page here, where you can schedule a Discovery Call to see if we’re the right fit for your organization.

Call To Action

Once again, I invite you, dear health executive, to be laser-focused with your intentions for 2025: to strengthen the nursing pipeline, and take an innovative approach to health and wellbeing of your hospital staff. Partnering with us for a Spring launch will help to strengthen your existing pipeline, while supporting the new hires to not repeat the same mistakes made in the health professions of the past.

By taking a proactive approach, and training all staff at the same time, you set the tone. Be brave, and determine that the health and personal development of your teams are the key to positive workplaces and employee retention. If you maintain this focus, as your top singular goal, you will make strides in all areas of your life. Take the first step and contact Lynn today at info@satorihealth.ca to discuss your current health and wellness strategy.