The Nursing Consortium of Florida’s Recruitment & Retention Committee initially convened leaders in practice and academia to assess the factors contributing to the “COVID exodus” and developed a range of strategies for reconstituting depleted nurse teams under more resilient nursing models better able to achieve improved metrics in environments that attract and retain a high performing nurse workforce. This committee monitors and supports progress in building practice-setting resilience while also developing strategies for strengthening nursing education.
The Nursing Consortium of Florida has a deep understanding of the factors contributing to the current nursing shortage in Florida and the challenges that the profession is facing as it replaces a generation of experienced nurses with inexperienced nursing school graduates. As nurse leaders pilot a range of initiatives designed to stabilize their pandemic-depleted workforce they continue to share what works, what doesn’t, and why. It may not be the norm elsewhere, but after decades of close collaboration the members of the Nursing Consortium of Florida know that, in good times and bad, nursing gets better together.
The nursing profession hasn’t needed to add so many new nurses this fast in more than half a century and back then the new hires had nurses with decades of experience on the unit to guide their entry into the workforce. During the COVID pandemic, hospitals lost approximately 30% of their nurse workforce in one year and it was, to a great extent, the most experienced nurses that left. Consequently, new hires completing an orientation period are likely to find themselves working alongside colleagues with only a year or two of experience.
Various strategies for reloading a depleted workforce have been developed and are being piloted across many of our more than 70 member organizations with varying degrees of success. The overarching solution is continued sharing of what is working, what isn’t, and why, so that what works can be replicated and further refined. The degree of collegial trust developed by the Nursing Consortium of Florida over nearly three decades makes this possible.
The Nursing Consortium of Florida is nursing’s community table where the profession’s leaders build on a long legacy of uncommon collaboration, to conduct effective youth outreach and develop and evolve programming that promotes careers in nursing.
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