Quality healthcare depends on talented and engaged providers who drive improved patient satisfaction and a healthy bottom-line. Nurses play a pivotal role in these equations, both through their skill sets as well as frequent, face-to-face communication with patients, caregivers, and physicians alike.
Therefore, it’s crucial for healthcare organizations to maintain an accurate, timely pulse on nurse satisfaction and engagement levels. Doing so allows them to quickly identify, analyze, and take action on any discrepancies and areas for improvement. At Betterworks Engage, we’ve seen the impact of poor nurse satisfaction rates with our healthcare customers, where a particular hospital was hiring 1,500 nurses annually, only to see a third of them quit within a year. Before we helped the hospital understand the dynamics driving turnover and put action plans in place, it was spending more than $10 million per year in rehiring costs alone, resources that could have gone to patient care instead.
In the effort to improve nurse satisfaction, surveys can be a powerful tool to monitor and increase engagement as long as providers pair a precise set of questions with a platform that quickly extracts and transforms data into relevant, actionable insights. Betterworks Engage recently became an accredited survey question provider for the prestigious Magnet Recognition Program® from the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). The ANCC’s parent organization, the American Nurses Association (ANA), has prioritized nurse engagement in recent years, making it a focal point in many of the educational programs and certifications it provides to healthcare organizations.
Therefore, we are providing our ANA/ANCC-Approved Nurse Satisfaction Survey Questions for Improved Engagement for organizations to use, whether or not they are seeking accreditation. As we’ll see by discussing the following topics, well-crafted survey questions are instrumental in improving nurse satisfaction levels and realizing the benefits of an engaged nurse staff:
- The Impact of Nurse Engagement Levels
- How the ANA & ANCC Empower Nurses
- The Magnet Recognition Program®
- Maximizing Survey Data With Technology
The Impact of Nurse Engagement Levels
Employee engagement is essential in every industry. Just by its definition – the emotional connection and level of commitment a worker feels towards an employer and their work – the benefits of improved engagement are obvious:
- Increased productivity
- A healthier, more robust culture
- Lower attrition
- Improved customer/patient satisfaction
In healthcare, employee engagement is just as essential to performance and productivity as it is in other industries, particularly for nursing staff. As statistics demonstrate, a provider that continuously monitors and improves nurse satisfaction and engagement gains distinct advantages over that which lacks a well-organized engagement strategy:
- A 1% rise in nurse engagement yields 0.5% higher patient satisfaction and a 3x greater likelihood of a Grade A in safety
- Hospitals with a satisfying culture have 3.4% less turnover, saving an average $52,100 for every registered nurse they don’t have to replace
- An increase in engagement of 1% correlates to 0.33% higher Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) ratings
How the ANA & ANCC Empower Nurses
The ANA has been a powerful voice for nurses for over a century while helping to drive improved healthcare within the United States. The organization focuses on initiatives that create a safer, healthier, and more productive work environment for nurses. By concentrating on these specific goals and improving the working conditions for nurses, the ANA, in turn, also drives better patient care and satisfaction rates. As the statistics imply, a nurse that is more engaged and satisfied with his or her position, employer, and workplace, provides better patient care.
As the accrediting arm of the ANA, the ANCC is responsible for educating healthcare providers and acknowledging those that prioritize advancements in nursing and, consequently, patient care as well. The healthcare industry embraces the role of the ANA and ANCC, recognizing the latter as the authority in nurse and facility credentialing. Of the many different programs offered by the ANCC, the Magnet Recognition Program® is, by far, the most rigorous for providers to achieve.
The Magnet Recognition Program®
ANCC Magnet Recognition® is the gold standard across the industry for healthcare facilities and providers, distinguishing those that commit to quality healthcare and nurse satisfaction. Approximately 800 hospitals out of the over 7,200 in the United States have the accreditation, making it one of the most exclusive programs in the industry.
The program encompasses over 40 separate requirements that hospitals must meet to acquire accreditation, one of which is the nurse survey process (EP2EO – Nurse Satisfaction). Betterworks Engage worked collaboratively with the ANCC Magnet Recognition Program® to support the 2019 Magnet® Application Manual guidelines and created a crosswalk of Registered Nurse (RN) satisfaction survey questions that meet the nine areas for patient satisfaction with Nursing. The ANCC Magnet Program approved the crosswalk in August 2019.
Maximizing Survey Data With Technology
Our work with the ANCC attests to the quality and effectiveness of our nurse satisfaction survey questions. However, given the importance of engagement in the field, affecting everything from the quality of patient care to productivity and cost efficiency, we don’t want to restrict our survey questions to just those hospitals and providers seeking Magnet Recognition®.
At Betterworks Engage, we believe in empowering all healthcare facilities with the tools they need to continually improve nurse engagement levels, including our ANA/ANCC-Approved Nurse Satisfaction Survey Questions. However, our set of questions is only the first step in increasing nurse engagement and satisfaction. Effective feedback software allows healthcare managers to segment the survey data into the most insightful categories and reports possible.
This distinction makes Betterworks Engage’s platform an especially powerful solution for healthcare organizations, including the likes of the Community Medical Centers Healthcare Network in Fresno, CA, Anthem, Delta Dental, Wesley Family Services, and many other customers throughout the United States.
Take the nurse satisfaction survey results and transform them into insights and actions that will drive positive change.
Our technology allows organizations to take the nurse satisfaction survey results and transform them into insights and actions that will drive positive change. Some of the unique benefits of using our feedback and engagement software with our survey questions include:
- Ability to categorize data by specific worker segments, comparing nurse satisfaction levels between different units, departments, locations, tenures, demographics, and other identifiers
- Built-in industry benchmarks to evaluate results against industry standards
- Integrated nurse satisfaction survey questions for convenience and efficiency
- Multichannel survey distribution to match a nurse’s preferred flow of work (mobile, text, email, etc.)
- Automated alerts & notifications to maximize nurse survey response rates
- Intuitive, in-depth reporting that empowers both managers and nurses
As exhaustive and precise as our ANCC-approved nurse satisfaction survey questions are, they will still only provide limited results on their own. To genuinely improve nurse engagement levels and, thus, patient satisfaction rates and operational efficiencies, management must be able to extract granular insights from the survey results.
From there, hospital leaders can develop action plans based on relevant, timely information to increase nurse engagement, lower turnover, and add new value to a nurse’s role. The process might start with our survey questions, but the insights and action plans they generate are those that truly drive improved nurse satisfaction.
