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Former health system CEO, Ron Paulus, shares insights from a Modern Healthcare panel discussion focused on the importance of investing in workplace and staff safety.
As a former health system CEO, I know that ensuring appropriate staffing remains a top priority. But a staggering 85% of hospital nurses plan to leave their current position within the next year. Today’s challenging workforce environment is going to get even tougher: an expected 193,100 nurses will retire every year through 2032. And that exodus will occur while the US population continues to age, with the 2050 national demographics mimicking Florida in 2020.
Digging deeper, National Nurses United (NNU) surveyed nurses between January and December of 2023 on the impact of workplace violence and found that 65% reported anxiety, fear, or the need for increased vigilance at work, and 37% considered leaving the profession entirely. Given that Becker’s reported that 86% of nurses say that a safer work environment would make them more likely to stay, these numbers are particularly troubling. And beyond turnover and other economic costs, workplace violence is simply unacceptable.
Nurses are a cornerstone of health systems and of our society, but what can be done?
To answer this question, I had the privilege of moderating a panel of industry experts in a webinar hosted by Modern Healthcare to discuss the evidence-based approach to workplace violence with a focus on technologies and processes utilized by leading healthcare organizations:
Joe Byham - VP of Public Safety at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health
Melissa Jones - Network Director of Workplace Violence Prevention Program at Inspira Health Network
Erin Jaynes - Chief Nursing Executive and Strategic Advisor at Commure Strongline
Enabling Healthcare Workplace Safety
Staff-Inclusive Programs
Too often decisions are made by healthcare organizations on new procedures or technologies without involving the end users whose day-to-day lives are affected by these changes. As Melissa Jones explains:
“If you pick a system and you don’t involve the staff and the staff don’t like it, they will find a workaround or they will just not use it, and you have basically wasted your money.”
To ensure staff buy-in, healthcare organizations must actively involve frontline workers in both the development and implementation of staff safety measures. At Inspira Health, for example, Melissa Jones shared that their workplace violence committee consists of “at least 50 percent direct line staff,” ensuring that those who are most affected by violence have a voice in shaping the solutions. Erin Jaynes echoed this sentiment saying “Let your staff tell you what they want. If you ask, they will tell you.”
The Role of Technology
Technology is a cornerstone of patient safety and the same opportunities exist to keep team members safe. When it comes to technologies that address workplace safety in healthcare, one category stands out among the rest: staff duress alerting solutions such as Commure Strongline. Joe Byham agrees saying:
“The biggest thing we ever did, bar none, has been implementing the Strongline wearable duress badge, and it’s really not even close; people feel safe and it shows results in the reduction in injuries without a doubt.”
Just having onsite security personnel, video monitoring and fixed location panic buttons is wholly inadequate. All staff must be protected and actions and interventions need to be guided by data and analytics, just as they do in patient safety. Wearable duress badges achieve exactly that, as Joe adds:
“We now know where you are and how to get there. We know exactly who we’re going to. We’re not running around looking for you. And it really has reduced our security response time.”
While nurses are most commonly on the frontlines experiencing the bulk of workplace violence, this issue extends to everyone working in a patient-facing capacity. Melissa Jones provides insight into her own workplace:
“When we talk about personal duress buttons, every single one of our staff in our hospitals have one. I don’t care if you’re EVS, if you’re finance, I don’t care who you are. You are going to have a duress button because workplace violence is on the rise.”
Knowing help is just a button press away helps to ease the anxiety and fear surrounding workplace violence and it is instrumental in enabling assistance for early de-escalation to avoid further harm.
Gaining Leadership Buy-In Through ROI
Investing in solutions like duress alerting to keep staff safe isn’t just a moral imperative, it’s also a business imperative. Industry data shows a single act of workplace violence is costly: The average cost per workplace violence victim due to disability and leave time is nearly $20,000, while the average cost to replace a single nurse is $56,000, according to NSI Nursing Solutions. That quickly adds up, according to Erin Jaynes:
"You can look at how many staff leave every year due to workplace violence. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent depending on the type of incidents that an organization is experiencing. Then you have healthcare costs and potential liability expenses for people who are injured due to workplace violence, who on average, cost somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 million a year that organizations are spending on workplace violence.”
Speaking specifically to Commure’s Strongline duress badges Erin said, “there is almost an instantaneous ROI that will happen when you deploy these types of systems that we’re talking about in that you are going to hear from nurses and other staff who say, ‘I’m never going to work at another place that doesn’t have something like this.’”
By facilitating rapid de-escalation and reducing incident intervention times, Strongline curtails these harmful financial impacts of WPV and supports a robust culture of safety. We have seen hospitals and health systems recoup the cost of the system within 3-4 months, and reduce annual incident costs by up to 30%.
Why Staff Retention Starts with Keeping Staff Safe from Harm
Keeping team members safe from workplace violence is a leader’s number one responsibility. It is also an essential investment with a significant return. Preventing and mitigating workplace violence requires innovative technology solutions and adherence to evidence-based best practices along with direct feedback from those working on the frontlines. This blog covers only a few aspects of what the panel had to share on this important topic, including how to involve staff in ideation, how to effectively implement duress badge technology, and approaches to demonstrate ROI to leadership.
To dive deeper into this topic and learn how you can transform your organization’s safety, watch the full on demand webinar and discover practical steps to create a safer, more secure environment for your healthcare team.
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