orm_november-2023 - 21

Staffing
of Jefferson Health's acute care locations.
Each week, the health system
uses staffing data to deploy nurses to
various regions to cover anticipated
staffing needs. Nurses have three different
tiers of floating to choose from:
multiple regions, multiple states, or the
entire health system.
These are full-time
Jefferson Health nurses
and employees, clarifies
Andrew Thum, MSN,
ML, RN, NE-BC, director
of nursing workforce
operations at Jefferson
Health. After starting
with a cohort of 25
nurses in July 2022, the
program has since hired
Andrew
Thum, MSN,
ML, RN,
NE-BC
140 nurses, with a goal of reaching
150 by the end of 2023.
RNs currently offer care to patients
in telemetry, progressive and intensive
care, and medical/surgical or postoperative
intervention care. The program
offers many perks, including a more
flexible work option to staff and an alternative
program to traditional agencies.
" The idea was that by founding
the SEAL program and hiring nurses
into the SEAL team, we would be able
to deploy our own internal resources
to where they were needed most, and
over time reduce our dependence
on both agency and premium labor
spend, " says Thum, who runs the SEAL
program.
SEAL offers a proactive look at
staffing, he continues.
If a certain
week requires a certain number of
nurses on the med-surg or the surgical
units because of anticipated surgical
volume, the staffing office can look
proactively a week in advance toward
deploying those SEAL nurse shift resources
to adequately provide postoperative
care.
Staff also enjoy the ability to, on a
week-to-week basis, work with different
nursing teams across campuses, says
Thum. Because they are full-time emwww.ormanager.com
Jefferson
Health SEAL nurse at work. Used with permission.
ployees, they get benefits and a salary
competitive to what an external agency
would pay them.
Surgeons prefer internal staff
SEAL guarantees the comfort of a familiar
face that knows Jefferson Health's
systems, structures, and policies, says
Daniel Hudson, MSN, RN, CENP, vice
president of nursing administration and
operations at Jefferson Health.
SEAL nurses deliver consistent, stable
knowledge that transfers across
the health system. An agency nurse or
temporary person would not have that
familiarity, says Hudson.
The same is true in Waltenbaugh's
experience. OR surgeons at Allegheny
Health enjoy walking into a room and
seeing the familiar crew, she reports.
Gaining surgeon buy-in takes a while,
she admits. " Clinically, these are the
superstars of our team. They come from
varied backgrounds, but they bring a lot
to the table, " she explains. " Each individual
surgeon has certain nuances the
staff needs to pick up on. There might
be a way the surgeon pulls the suture
or that they want the scalpel handed to
them. " An internal team will know and
embrace those nuances, she emphasizes.
Initial
outcomes point to savings
Allegheny Health launched its travel
team in September 2022. During the
program's first 6 months, the team
completed 5,011 surgical procedures
with just 10 OR nurses, 13 surgical
techs, and 11 recovery room nurses.
Annual cost savings are projected
at $2.8 million, when compared to the
cost of using an external agency. That
is clearly a win, says Waltenbaugh.
In Jefferson Health's SEAL program,
" every SEAL RN who replaces an
agency RN saves us an average of $18
per hour, " says Thum. " With 150 SEAL
RNs, there is the potential to save an
average of $90,000 per week and $4.6
million annually. "
Getting to 100% internal staff is a
goal that is still a ways off for Jefferson
Health. Currently, less than 5% of all
nurses represent internal SEAL staff.
Although it is a work in progress, this
is going to have a significant impact on
operations, says Hudson.
An early example of this progress is
the zero-agency staff rate in the acute
OR Manager | Nov/Dec 2023 21
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