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News Article
Local Hospitals Seek Nurse Training as Turnover Cure
San Francisco Business Times
June 22, 2007
by Chris Rauber
Two more Northern California hospitals have joined John Muir Medical Center and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in implementing an innovative nurse-training and mentoring program said to reduce registered nurse turnover significantly. Recruiting and retaining nurses is a huge priority for hospitals nationwide and throughout the state, and that's especially true in the high-cost Bay Area.
New customers for a nurse residency program run by Versant Advantage Inc. include the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and Doctors Hospital of Manteca, a 73-bed Tenet Healthcare Corp. facility with a large outpatient component. Training is 22 weeks for pediatric RNs and 18 weeks in adult facilities.
The first group of 15 trainees at the VA Palo Alto started in February and will graduate in August, said Alice Naqvi, associate chief of staff for nursing at the 900-bed, nine-site Veterans Affairs facility. "We've been having trouble attracting new graduates for a couple of years," she said, in large part because of the region's stratospheric housing prices. Many of her RNs commute from as far away as Modesto, Stockton and Merced.
The Versant training costs $5,000 per nurse, but customers say it can cut recruitment and retention costs dramatically because of its appeal to nurses.
Versant, a nonprofit offshoot of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, now has 52 hospital clients nationwide, up from 15 a year ago, including Baptist Health of Miami, Seton Medical Center Austin and Tucson's Carondelet Health Network, according to Versant CEO Charles Krozek. Seton and Carondelet are part of the huge St. Louis-based Ascension Health system.
So far, however, Northern California's largest hospital systems -- Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and Catholic Healthcare West -- have stayed on the sidelines where Versant is concerned. That's something Krozek would love to change, but it may not happen, he admits. "Sometimes the large systems like to do it themselves," he said. "But we're starting to work with Tenet."
John Muir, which started with Versant in mid-2005, and Lucile Packard, which started in February 2005, say the RN-training program has done just about everything they hoped it would.
Beginning nurses who complete the residency are "very competent and very confident in their skills, and that's a tribute to the way the program's set up," said Pam Wells, Packard's vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer or CNO.
Wells said the training helps attract nurses from as far away as New York, Atlanta and Wisconsin, resulting in 10 applicants for each of 20 spots in Packard's program.
Turnover, meanwhile, is just 5 percent among nurses who complete the program, compared with an overall rate of 7 percent to 9 percent at Packard. Prior to implementing the Versant training, Packard's overall RN turnover was 15 percent for nurses with less than two years on staff, and up to 50 percent in some units, Wells said.
Similar results are occurring at John Muir, where a spokeswoman for CNO Bev Jones said 92 percent of those from the first training group two years ago are still employed at the Walnut Creek medical center, along with 100 percent of graduates from last summer's program. All told, 133 Muir nurses have started the training since July 2005, and 118 have completed it.
(Posted June 27, 2007)