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Top 10 Nursing Stories of 2011

 |  By rhendren@healthleadersmedia.com  
   December 13, 2011

2011 has been a tumultuous year as healthcare organizations come to grips with value-based purchasing, rules for ACOs, meaningful use, and financial upheaval. Nursing has dealt with continued cost cutting while also being expected to lead care delivery transformation, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce healthcare-associated infections.

Here's a rundown of the most popular nursing stories we covered in 2011 in case you missed them or just want to have another look.

1. Five Reasons Nurses Want to Leave Your Hospital
Are your nurses engaged, committed employees? Or are they biding their time until they can go somewhere better? Mandatory overtime and ignored bad behavior are two issues that have nurses eyeing the exits.

2. Suicide After Medical Error Highlights Importance of Support for Clinicians
A tragic story about the death of a child from a medical error turned even sadder in the spring after the nurse who administered the medication took her own life. The incident served as a grim wake-up call for hospitals and how to deal with clinicians after errors.

3. 5 Ways to Retain New Graduate Nurses
New nurses have a difficult time bridging the gap from nursing school to practice and often don’t stay with their first job for the long term. Hospitals can recognize this transition and help new graduate nurses through the transition with these five strategies that ensure they are engaged, long-term employees.

4. Does Mandating Nurse-Patient Ratios Improve Care?
The debate intensified as more than a dozen states considered laws to establish hospital nurse-to-patient ratios. This article examined whether patients get better care, experience fewer adverse events, and have shorter lengths of stay and lower mortality with ratios.

5. 3 Obstacles to Higher Education Levels in Nursing
Evidence shows that patient outcomes improve when nurses have baccalaureate degrees. But most nurses don't have them, and increasing the numbers with BSNs is tough. Nurse leaders must get fired up and overcome three things that stand in their way.

6. 5 Ways to Reduce Nursing Turnover in Year One
Turnover among first-year nurses remains a huge cost driver and source of frustration for hospital managers. It's hard enough to find these skilled clinicians, and even more annoying that they quit, just when they should be settling into their new careers. That leaves harried HR staff to start the process anew and with no more assurances of retaining the next new recruit.

7. Nurse Executives Focus on Complexity of Care Delivery

The average nurse is in cognitive overload, completing about 100 tasks per shift with an interruption every three minutes. At its annual meeting in last spring, the American Organization of Nurse Executives' put the spotlight on the current nature of nursing work to see how care delivery can be reshaped.

8. 10 Ways to Help Nurses Improve Patient Satisfaction
Nurses can make or break the patient experience. So why do we make it so hard for them to have positive interactions with patients? Here are 10 changes to nurse procedures and working conditions that would improve patient experience.

9. Top 5 Challenges Facing Nursing in 2012
The year 2010 may have been when enormous healthcare changes began, but 2011 was the year these changes hit nursing. And in 2012 every nurse leader and manager must be prepared for the full impact.

10. Nurse Staffing Costs Must Be Weighed Against Cost of Errors
When revenues fall, hospitals stop investing in the biggest budget expense: nurses. That's a bad short-term solution to a long-term problem. Executives must acquaint themselves with studies demonstrating how nurse staffing affects a hospital's overall performance and base staffing decisions on evidence.

And one more...

11. Talk to Nurses About Facebook Before They Talk About You
Facebook's ubiquity makes people not think about it very much. It's just part of life. But when one's profession involves interacting in other people's lives, the lines can be blurred. And that's a problem for employers.

Rebecca Hendren is a senior managing editor at HCPro, Inc. in Danvers, MA. She edits www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com and manages The Leaders' Lounge blog for nurse managers. Email her at rhendren@hcpro.com.

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